So here I am, again claiming to stick to blogging. This time I’ll start with a look back at 2018 and my New Year resolutions that will make sure 2019 will be a blast.

Last year was a challenge for me as so many things happened that impacted my work-life. I transitioned into management and became Engineering Lead in the Search department at Zalando. I was surprised at how much I actually like working with people. In my life as individual contributor I was mostly writing code and argued about it. Now I enjoy understanding someone else’s motivation, where she is coming from, what her goals are and how I might help her.

And honestly I also like the increased influence: talking to key people in the organization earlier in the process helps me direct the course better. And people tend to listen to me more open than before, which obviously is a strange flaw in the organization. But that is a different topic.

I read a ton of books and blogs about transitioning. I liked The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier. I started reading Managing Humans and have not yet finished. I did read some old time classics even before like The five dysfunctions of a team, a book you should probably go through every once in a while. Another great classic is Peopleware, short and concise. Radical Candor is on the top of my reading list. Lately I’ve been involved in strategy topics and one great book in this area is Good Strategy/Bad Strategy with a lot of examples for good and bad strategy.

I signed up for the Software Lead Weekly newsletter and joined Rands Leadership Slack. Particularly the face to face meetings are a great experience as you get to speak to so many great people from all over the world about leadership topics. Another benefit is that talking to external leaders outside of one’s organization brings a different, hopefully unbiased perspective into your work.

But all of this came at a cost: I’m not coding anymore. There are days when I first open my Laptop after lunch. I had to learn to manage my calendar, block time for lunch, otherwise people will just add meetings into empty spots. Prioritization is even more important now as just about everyone wants something from me.

My 2019 Goals Link to heading

In this year I’ll be working as manager for almost a full year now. I made mistakes and I will continue to make them but I want to learn from them.

Keep on Coding Link to heading

My job title is Engineering Lead. But how can I be an Engineering Lead when I’m not writing code? Or not participating in Code reviews? Architecture decisions? That does not mean I need to make all the decisions or tell people how to write code. But I don’t want to loose grip. I think it is important to feel the pain your engineers go through. This could mean taking a 24x7 shift every once in a while. Or fixing a bug in one of our systems.

For now I’m trying to maintain one of our Kafka Streams components written in Clojure. I recently contributed patches to Jackdaw, a Clojure wrapper for Kafka Streams. It felt pretty good!

Writing Habit Link to heading

I’m also very passionate about good system architecture. Several of the challenges my teams have today are because it’s always easier to build programs and not systems. That means it’s always easier to write a couple of lines of code and make flag X appear in the domain model. If we would instead focus on writing code that enables a more general notion of how adding flags to the domain model, we would not be adding more and more lines to the same code base for new flags.

But in order to transport this into the wider organization it is essential to write things down and share them. In the past I always tried to talk to people and individually they often agree. But writing things down increases the audience and hopefully influences more people. But this is something I need to work on.

Learn to say no Link to heading

No is a very powerful word. I cannot save everyone and everything. And no brings me to my next and last goal:

Balance my life Link to heading

Paul Adams wrote an interesting piece on How I try to organise my life to make me happy. He has some interesting points and formalizes what many people think. The idea originates from a speech by Matthew McConaughey in 2015 and is about identifying the things that matter to you and tracking the time spend doing them. Ideally there should be a balance in all the areas in order to keep you healthy.

Identifying the things that matter to me is simple as they are exactly the same as for Paul: Father, Husband, Family, Friend, Colleague, Me. I probably would not go as far as mapping the results, but keeping track of them in my org-mode files would be an even nerdier start.

That is pretty much it. Let’s see what I will write in January 2020…