More Posts On Engineering Management

March 8, 2021

I've been continuing my posts on Engineering Management the last few weeks. To keep email volume reasonable, I'm going to continue rolling these up into...

A New Series of Posts On Engineering Management

February 22, 2021

Hi there! I’m spending the next 2 months on parental leave helping take care of our 2 year old, newborn and 8 month old puppy, so life is a bit crazy these...

benmccormick.org 2020 Roundup

December 31, 2020

Included below is my 2020 roundup post from the blog. Thank you all for continue following this newsletter through a year that has been quiet in terms of...

How Teams Go Faster

September 8, 2020

Hi all 👋 As I’m rebooting my blog / newsletter, I am continuing to play around with the format. This week I simplified my site design (it had gotten a bit...

Simple Burnout Triage

August 31, 2020

This week's post is relevant to all of us who are on month 6 of pandemic life. To paraphrase the footnote below A season is only a season if it has a defined...

Better Than A Guess

August 23, 2020

👋 Hi there! It's been a minute since I sent one of these, and while I'm not at a point in life where I'm going to be able to send weekly newsletters, expect...

Fun with Ascii: Putting some console art on my site

January 1, 2020

In addition to the post below, I have a roundup of 2019 up on the site, feel free to check it out! Fun with Ascii: Putting some console art on my site I’ve...

How Software Engineers Produce Value

December 19, 2019

👋Hi there! It has been a minute since I’ve been able to send one of these. I started a new job and it’s been a whirlwind. I also have a one year old in my...

Book Review: Resilient Management

July 22, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article Resilient Management by Lara Hogan is a short and useful read for engineering managers who want to think more systematically about how...

Avoiding Derived State In React

June 17, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article A lot of advice in the React community is focused around avoiding explicitly storing "derived state" of some type or another. Some...

Lessons from Managing A Distributed Team

June 10, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article Working with people over the internet is different from meeting in an office five days a week. This isn’t a moral statement. I’ve done...

Lessons from Managing A Distributed Team

June 10, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article Working with people over the internet is different from meeting in an office five days a week. This isn't a moral statement. I've done...

Thinking About Values

May 27, 2019

Hi All, Before you get to the article, I'd love a bit of feedback from you. I'm starting to write more posts on leadership/management topics (the following...

Herding Lions

May 20, 2019

Update: I’m working on making some changes to the blog right now, and some inconsistency in posting will probably continue for the next few weeks. Should...

Obvious Things

May 6, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article I saw a tweet thread a few weeks ago that made me think: There’s a bit of a meme in some parts that there is value in saying, out loud,...

How To Get Better Feedback On Your Code

April 15, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article Deliberate practice [is when] (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you're trying to improve [...] (2) you receive...

Ten Soft Skills That Will Shape Your Career

April 8, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article One of the most popular posts in the history of my blog was a list with the click-baity name Ten Things A Serious JavaScript Developer...

Consistency

March 25, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article The last few weeks I've had several conversations with a coworker about consistency in code: why do we do things one way here, and a...

Lessons from Six Months As A Manager/Developer Hybrid

March 18, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article For the last 6 months I've been serving as a hybrid developer/engineering manager. It's been an interesting experience, and because this...

Double Book Review: Deep Work & The Common Rule

March 11, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article I’m trying something different today. This is a review of 2 books I’ve read recently; I’m combining them because their similarities and...

Utility Functions

March 4, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article As I’ve gone through projects over time, I’ve found a few functions that I end up creating for every significant project that I’ve...

The Importance of Writing For Software Developers

February 25, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article Once somebody hits a minimum threshold of technical skill to hold a job in the industry, about 80% of their ability to succeed in...

How To Keep Learning JavaScript

February 18, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article A member of my team at work asked me last week how I continue to learn things about JavaScript. This is my answer. Note that it is...

Strategic Coding

February 11, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article I recently read A Philosophy Of Software Design by John Ousterhout. In an early chapter he paints a picture of a "tactical tornado"...

Reusable Code In React: Inheritance, Composition, Decorators and Mixins

February 4, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article Once you get past the initial complexity it creates by bucking conventions, React is the most developer friendly UI library I have ever...

Designing Front End Apps For Performance

January 28, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article Performance is a tricky topic to give generalized advice about. Moreso than any of the other front end concerns I discussed in my post...

Improving Code Readability With Async/Await

January 21, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article When it first became a part of JavaScript, I wasn't sure how much I was going to use async-await. I could see that it made things...

Designing Front End Apps For Reliability

January 14, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article In my recent post on Front End Architecture I identified Reliability as a key concern of front end architecture. I define reliability as...

6 Keys To Valuable Code Reviews

January 7, 2019

📖 This Weeks Article I've read 2 things lately that really reminded me of the value of code reviews. One was A Philosophy Of Software Design by John...

What's Involved In Front End Architecture?

December 31, 2018

📖 This Weeks Article The word "architecture" gets thrown around a lot in software discussions. But we don't seem to always use it the same way. Some example...

New Newsletter and The 2018 Roundup

December 22, 2018

Hi all, this is Ben McCormick. This is my first week trying out a new newsletter format for email subscribers. More details below in the post, but I'd love...