Nearly four years ago, I started managing engineering teams. I took the plunge from being an individual developer to managing because I felt it would better allow me to influence the technical direction of my organization, build an awesome team, and most importantly, help others grow and develop with the same opportunities I had. Four years in, I am still learning every day, but I’ve learned a lot I wish I had known earlier.

I love Zion National Park. I’ve been there twice in the last two years and can’t get enough. The soaring mountain peaks that overlook the canyon, the verdant green valley along the river, the bighorn sheep I’ve seen every time I’ve passed through the area; these all make it remarkable and incredible. Of the National Parks I’ve been to, it’s the only one that feels less like a unique piece of landscape that deserves protection, and more like a other-worldly oasis that should be kept hidden from the world.

Parents know that books are a key part of early development for children. Families who read together at least five minutes a day raise kids with higher literacy rates in school, large vocabularies, and perform better on tests. Kids who enjoy books also need fewer distractions if they can just sit and read peacefully. Carrying around a few books instead of a bag of toys is a lot easier when leaving the house too.

If you love Amazon Chime, and who doesn’t, you’ve probably already embraced it as a widespread communication platform for your team. Since moving to Chime a few months ago, my team has moved almost all communication onto it. We have a team chat room, rooms for individual projects, rooms for scheduling and coordinating testing, and ones for a variety of on-the-side projects and hobbies. We use it exclusively for scheduled meetings and adhoc conversations especially on days when everyone is working from home - thanks snow.

In 2017, I was able to read through over 80 books, largely thanks to the great power of Audible and 3x listening. I also found that reading books in between the little things when the boys needed attention was easier than picking up other things. I also weaned myself off of most social media, especially Twitter which was my normal nightly ritual, freeing up more time for other things, mostly reading.

The world will be a very different place when my boys are grown up. There might actually be fewer protected public land, fewer animal species, and very different weather. Some of our National Parks, if they even still exist as parks, will be quite different than they are now. We need to take action now, but we also need to start on the next generation of conservationists. To make sure that happens, I’m raising my boys to appreciate nature and animals from an early age.

One day, taking inspiration from Wild and A Walk in the Woods, I’m going to hike the entirety of the Appalachian Trail. When I do it though, I don’t think I’ll be risking it in the winter when temperatures plunge and snow quickly turns to ice. Trail markers get obscured, sections that are technical and challenging in the best conditions become nearly impossible, and snow covers treacherous holes in the ground that can twist an ankle.

What’s more complex, a large-scale distributed system or a child. For parents, it’s obvious. At least systems tend to behave rationally. However, much like children, large systems are inherently complex. As complexity increases, unforeseen behavior emerges and causes unpredictable results. Sound like a child? Chaos Engineering, a software engineering methodology, aims to understand that complexity through experiments. Chaos Engineering is the practice of utilizing experiments to better understand complex systems by intentionally causing chaos and measuring what results.

This is another great example of the awesome people I work with. One of my team members built a homegrown Internet connected controller for his A/C and used the opportunity to learn several new technologies including SparkJava. I love this kind of passion for learning new tech on personal projects. I can’t wait to see how we might use some of this.

I am constantly amazed by the genius of the people I am surrounded by at work. While setting up a demo of SonarQube to show my team’s tech debt, I asked if anyone had experience with using it. I thought someone might have some pointers on setting it up. Instead, I got sent this research paper a team member wrote about a case study measuring debt with SonarQube. So cool!