The sky is not falling, buildings are not crumbling and the grid is not burning.

It's not revolutionary either, but slowly picking up traction. You see more and more installations here in Berlin. On the country side where people have their own house and enough space it's a total no-brainer to set up one of those mini solar systems.

The typical systems you can buy off the shelf (800-1000W panels + inverter) amortize after a few years already, and are getting cheaper every year. I have the feeling the main limitation in the city is having a nice balcony with good mounting points.

It maps your cycling activity data against the OpenStreetMap catalogue to generate all kinds of exploration statistics.

But somehow, even in startups with short remaining runway, "code red" rarely means anything.

You still have to attend all the overhead meetings, run through approval circles, deal with HR etc etc.

https://cyclonauts.net

Right, it's the same kind of pictures mentioned in the article. Life happening. The kids helping you cooking, mom goofing around, the family hiking etc etc.

It's not the landscape, some flowers, fireworks, a beach usually. What you care about are people and the moments you spent with them.

What helped me a lot were 2 things:

1) There are ways to improve your conversation skills. Big topic, with lots of branches. Your speech matters. Your tone. Keep collecting interesting anecdotes. Culture some depth to your personality that is unrelated to work (e.g. interesting hobbies). Essentially train your charisma.

2) The big eye opener for me was the discovery that different groups of people actually react differently to me. I.e. I was simply friends with people who ... didn't care as much about me as I cared about them. The blunt fix here is to change your social circles. Not easy, but doable, slowly, over time.

The "interesting hobby" part of the charisma training actually helps there to connect to different groups of people.

IMO a good approach is to have the actual code owners (i.e. the team responsible for a specific service or library) review the PR. If they think a shallow LGTM review of 3k LOC is enough, they can also deal with the bugs :-)

If you don't have specific ownership in your code base I'd start there.

Sure, I never studied medicine and the hospital stated that they are looking for a doctor, but the experience should count no?

Oh man. I keep thinking about Software Engineering as a craft. Only in our profession is it considered completely acceptable to work without any professional education.

Lawyers, doctors, nurses, even tax accountants go to jail if they practice without being licensed.

You wouldn't get your house wired by some random dude, instead you're looking for a proper, licensed electrician.

But in tech? Somehow we normalized random kids just building critical architecture.

I wonder if that's an anomaly from the exponential, chaotic growth that happened to software engineering since the 60s. I wouldn't be surprised if things normalize, like in a lot of other, mature fields of professions.

But otherwise this feels like asking what's coming next for Algebra.

From a personal perspective things should be pretty clear, no? Understand that your cofounder suddenly has a very different perspective on life and must change his priorities immediately. If he is going through chemo or surgery there will be long stretches where he will not be able to support you or the company. He may or may not come back. He may not recover. Cancer sucks.

From a company perspective things should also be clear? This is exactly why you have clause upon clause in your contracts, notarized, lawyered and signed. Life happens. People die, have accidents, quit, become sick. If you are unsure about your legal obligations get a lawyer.

The norm here in German startup world seem to be open floors. And if you do have rooms they get crammed full of people.

It's not the end of the world though. A room full of engineers is tolerable, and if they're on your team this is even desirable.

The trouble only comes when the CEO wants to see everyone sweating, so you get stuffed together with Sales or Ops.

Working from home made things a lot easier though. And if the company is big enough it's usually also possible to just book a meeting room if you need to work in silence for a while :-)

Eat less and you'll be fine.

For me 2 things help with the sleep deprivation, power naps and going to bed super early once in a while.

Power naps started working for me nicely once I removed the stressful requirement of actually having to sleep. I just set my phone timer for 20 minutes and allow my mind to float away. Just hitting sleep for a few minutes this way is super helpful and refreshing. And 20 mins you can easily sneak in even into a work day, or when coming home from work.

The going to bed super early is just me crashing once in a while. Sleep deprivation accumulates and for the sake of my health I just let my body crash at 7pm. Happens maybe once a month.

Looking for a new challenge as tech lead, architect, VPE or similar.

  Location: Berlin / Germany
  Remote: yes
  Willing to relocate: no (can't, family)
  Technologies: Nodejs, Typescript, React, Postgres, AWS and lots more
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marko-schilde-14095480/
  Email: simmschi@gmail.com

Nobody usually wants this.

For developers scrum is actually quite nice. The main success metric is predictability, i.e. the team is held accountable for delivering the sprint successfully. Which means you're supposed to be left alone while the sprint is ongoing.

Some bug? Pfft, if not critical, will maybe take it next sprint.

Finance needs a new report, pronto? Sure, let's talk about business value for priorization. And earliest next sprint anyway.

CEO has a crazy idea that he wants somebody to pull off? Sure, but please talk to Product.

What do you mean, you need more story points delivered per sprint?

The main issue is there are actually people that thrive in this kind of bureaucrazy. I've seen a number of 20-something POs burning themselves over these shitty processes.