Sunday, April 28, 2013

Office Management Excellence Community Recommended Books


Monday, April 22, 2013

Keeping people really matters

Tech companies do a generally poor job at keeping employees from leaving, and replacing people is really hard.

Zach Holman (Github) recently posted a deck on this topic.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Thoughts on on-boarding new hires

Bad onboarding:
  • A top-down marathon of meetings with tiers of managers and painfully boring training videos
  • New recruits treated like helpless new kids.

A better on-boarding:
  • Giving new recruits a very safe way to actually do, learning by doing is actually the best way to learn anything
  • Since building software is a social activity, giving them an opportunity to work with different teams and different code bases across the organization. This also helps communicating the big picture and the endless opportunities at the company.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

What is an Enterprise Social Network?

An Enterprise Social Network is a media to connect individuals who share similar business interests or activities.

Social tools can help employees to access the knowledge and resources they need to work together effectively and solve business problems.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Set Up a Virtualhost for Your Rails App on Localhost on OSX

You can map http://myapp.dev:80 to http://localhost:3000 easily.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

According to the book, the five dysfunctions are:

  • Absence of trust—unwilling to be vulnerable within the group
  • Fear of conflict—seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate
  • Lack of commitment—feigning buy-in for group decisions creates ambiguity throughout the organization
  • Avoidance of accountability—ducking the responsibility to call peers on counterproductive behavior which sets low standards
  • Inattention to results—focusing on personal success, status and ego before team success

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Patrick Lencioni's The Three Signs of a Miserable Job

There are three areas in addressing job misery.
  • People must feel that what they do is relevant and important. ("irrelevance")
  • People must feel that they are known and cared about. ("anonymity")
  • People thrive in an environment where they are given feedback. ("immeasurement")

"Managers who take the time to get to know their people on a personal basis and help them connect what they do with why it is important, go a long way toward engaging the heart, mind and soul of their team. To keep the "what and why" top-of-mind with employees, successful managers use performance measures to provide feedback to each individual so each one can self manage toward better outcomes."

"You don’t grow companies, you grow people and people grow companies"


Thursday, April 4, 2013

Git Grep with Git Blame

If you ever wished you could run git blame on the results of git grep then have a look at this

Monday, April 1, 2013

How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub

I finally got to see Zach Holman's talk on 'How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub', it was great.

He describes a process based on a simple branching strategy; branching master to a feature branch, when finished merged back or thrown away, also open a pull request to welcome discussion around the code/feature/strategy and guarantee quality.

Master is always deployable and passes CI, so everyone can push to master and everyone can deploy, which let people have responsibility over their code and frees up time from micromanaging someone else's code.