July 2021 Summaries

In this text, Jessica Cregg shares her experience transitioning from a career in PR and Marketing to becoming a Developer Advocate at LaunchDarkly. She emphasizes the importance of adopting a growth mindset when entering a new field, overcoming limiting beliefs, and embracing challenges as opportunities for personal development. Jessica provides tips on how to conduct a personal skills audit, establish role models, prioritize learning, embrace failures, and celebrate wins during career transitions.

In this article, the author discusses the problems with categorizing people into technical or non-technical roles and provides advice for those who have been labeled as non-technical but are succeeding in tech roles. The key points include separating one's identity from their role, focusing on critical skills for new positions, encouraging the development of both engineering and non-engineering skills, avoiding stereotypes, recognizing personal worth, finding ways to add value, embracing diversity of thought, and building inclusive communities.

Technical writers play a crucial role in breaking down complex concepts and presenting them in an easy-to-understand manner for users. They work closely with engineers, designers, developers, technical support, and user experience experts to translate complicated technical concepts into a format that customers can use and understand. A typical day for a technical writer may involve editing first-draft documentation, making updates based on customer feedback, collaborating with the UX team, reviewing urgent changes in GitHub, hosting "Documentation Office Hours," visiting support team's office hours, and planning tasks for the following day. Technical writers are essential to ensuring seamless user experiences and clear communication of product features.

LaunchDarkly has become the first feature management solution to pursue FedRAMP authorization, aiming to help federal agencies improve their development processes. Feature management allows for granular control over software features and can be used alongside Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) processes. This approach enables faster development and quicker reactions to incidents while reducing risk to the agency. LaunchDarkly is already in use by 15 federal agencies, assisting them with responsiveness to executive orders, incident management, and handling frequent updates related to Covid-19.

The third-annual Trajectory conference is set for November 9-10, featuring a hybrid event with virtual streamed sessions and in-person options in Oakland, CA, and New York, NY. This year's themes include developer productivity, experimentation, value stream mapping, platform engineering, and reliability & resilience. The conference is currently accepting talk and workshop proposals related to these topics until August 9th.

Transitioning from an individual contributor to a managerial role involves navigating a complex landscape of responsibilities, time management, and personal commitments. As a manager of a developer marketing team at a high-growth startup, the author shares insights into their weekly routine, which includes balancing time zones, managing a packed meeting schedule, and ensuring time for family and personal well-being. The work week is structured to accommodate overlapping time zones, with a dedicated no-meeting day to focus on tasks and avoid burnout. Mondays are reserved for one-on-one meetings, while Tuesdays allow for ad-hoc meetings and internal trainings. Wednesdays are typically set aside for uninterrupted work, although they sometimes include mentoring or social interactions. Thursdays are filled with standing meetings, including bi-monthly all-hands, and Fridays are used to tackle unfinished tasks. Asynchronous communication through daily Slack stand-ups helps manage the distributed team, and the emphasis is placed on maintaining balance, aligning with the company's value that "work is not life." Despite occasional disruptions like conferences or personal commitments, the author has found a schedule that effectively balances focus work, team support, and personal projects.

The tech industry often categorizes roles as either "technical" or "non-technical," which can create confusion for those interested in technology but not in coding, as discussed in a series by Dawn Parzych. Despite this binary classification, various roles require technical knowledge without necessitating coding skills, such as technical writers, product managers, data analysts, and developer relations professionals. These positions demand familiarity with the technology and the ability to convey complex information effectively. The article highlights the importance of understanding technical concepts and possessing skills like writing, strategic planning, data analysis, and communication to excel in these roles. It also emphasizes the fluidity of job titles, reflecting the industry's evolving nature, and encourages individuals to explore diverse career paths in tech that align with their skills and interests, underscoring the limitless opportunities available beyond traditional coding roles.

In this session from VTS' user conference, Caley Brock discusses how the company improved its release pipeline by implementing LaunchDarkly configs and AsyncQA (Asynchronous QA) process. The AsyncQA process involves writing code and tests behind feature flags, merging and deploying them immediately, allowing QA to test anytime on an integrated environment or in production. This approach led to a 20% reduction in cycle time while maintaining quality metrics. However, the increase in flags due to AsyncQA posed challenges such as disorganization and potential for human error. LaunchDarkly's tagging system, integrations, and permissions helped mitigate these issues by providing better organization, integration with existing tools, and automated reminders for flag removal. The company is now confident in its ability to switch to AsyncQA and leverage the benefits of this process change.

The term "technical" is commonly used to describe people skilled or knowledgeable in a particular field, but its meaning can vary greatly depending on the context. In this article, the author explores the concept of technicality and how it relates to various roles within the technology industry. They argue that instead of labeling individuals as either "technical" or "non-technical," we should view technical ability as a continuum, with different levels of expertise required for different roles. The author also discusses the potential negative consequences of using these labels, such as impostor syndrome and gatekeeping, and offers suggestions for how to retire them in favor of more specific descriptions of skills and knowledge.