Will Larson's Blog, page 31
January 25, 2020
Example Call For Proposals submissions.
I was chatting with a couple folks recently about submitting a talk proposal to TheLeadDev, and it reminded me of something that used to prevent me from submitting talks: I had no idea what a good Call For Proposal submission looked like.
At Stripe, both Julia Evans and Amy Nguyen were kind enough to host recurring sessions where they helped folks craft their first submission for a tech conference CFPs, which – to the best of my memory – resulted in every one of those talks...
January 21, 2020
Joining Calm.
Today is a particularly exciting day because I can finally stop telling folks that I’m joining a new role, and instead say that I’ve started a new role, and in particular that I’ve joined Calm to serve as their CTO. I’ve written a few words here, will update my Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, and then it’s time to get to work on my first ninety days.
Deciding to embark on a new endeavor is never easy, so I wouldn’t say that deciding to join Calm was easy! It took a good deal of reflection on...
January 18, 2020
Some rough notes on running learning circles.
I’m experimenting with putting together a couple of learning circles, and someone who wants to run a similar program within their company reached out for advice on structuring groups for success. I’ve organized a couple and participated in a couple others, but honestly I don’t think I have a great handle on best practices here, but I’ll jot down what I’ve learned nonetheless as a reusable, referenceable artifact.
Groups require maintenance and attention to succeed, this means having an...January 16, 2020
How to build your company's engineering brand.
If you end up working in an engineering team that wants to accelerate hiring, at some point you’ll hear the dreaded statement, “We need to grow our eng brand.” The method to accomplish that aim isn’t always clear, but the goal: what can we do so that candidates enter our process thinking highly of our engineering efforts?
After participating in a couple of eng brand kickoffs, a common playbook starts to emerge. Since that playbook often gets recreated across each company, I wanted to take...
January 14, 2020
More great memos.
I spent some time a few months ago reading @sriramk’s list of great memos, and tweeted some of the ones I particularly enjoyed. Someone privately pointed out to me that the authors I'd tweeted were all men. I was disappointed that I hadn’t noticed that earlier myself, and decided to spend some time exploring for great memos written by a more diverse cohort of authors.
Before going too far, a quick note on how Sriram defined a memo in his collection:
I'm fascinated by interesting memos written...
January 13, 2020
Your first 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering.
Whenever I transition to a new opportunity, I think about how to start well. How can I ramp up as effectively as possible? How do I balance the urge to “show value” early with making the right decisions?
The canonical book on starting a new role is The First 90 Days, and I got a fair amount out of it when I read it six or seven years ago. That said, its advice skews generic at times. Yes, I should learn as much as possible. Yes, I should achieve alignment and negotiate for resources. Yes, I...
January 2, 2020
How to navigate and/or survive your acquihire.
As I wrote up the story of SocialCode’s acquihire of the Digg team, I had to keep editing out meta-commentary about the process. It’s hard to tell a coherent story when you keep slipping into tips and observations, so I pulled them out and collected them here.
This post is focused on talent acquisitions, sometimes called “acquihires”, where an acquiring company wants to acquire another company’s team. I’ll focus on a typical Silicon Valley acquihire, which focus on acquiring the engineering...
January 1, 2020
How the Digg team was acquihired.
About a year after the catastrophic Digg V4 launch, our last-ditch experiment to salvage the site showed a spark of hope. We’d cajoled our way into a Facebook beta that allowed us to publish each Digger’s read articles into their Facebook newsfeed, sending every clicking friend directly to Digg’s permalink page, where they might click on our ads and maybe even create an account.
The early statistics were grave. An entrepreneur-in-residence at one of our investors built us a virality model...
December 26, 2019
2019 in review.
This has been a really special year for me personally, enough so that even though I won’t get into full detail about the two things (one professional, one personal) I’m most excited about (more in a month or two), writing a year-in-review still fills me with gratitude.
Goals for 2019I never posted my goals for 2019, but I wrote them up in a personal note, and I’ll start by reflecting on them a bit. A year ago when I set these goals, I was feeling a bit stretched by the...
December 20, 2019
"Good Process is Evolved, Not Designed" in 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know
Earlier in the year, I got the chance to contribute an article to Camille Fournier's latest book, 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know, and jumped at the chance to write something. The piece I contributed is Good Process is Evolved, Not Designed, and is a streamlined version of an earlier blog post, which I've also converted into a short conference talk.
I enjoyed this process quite a bit, in particular because it was an opportunity to work in a different medium with different...
