Reading from this week.
Ten Lessons from GitHub’s First Year
By: Tom Preston-Werner
A flashback to 2008, where Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub, summarizes the company’s first year. This article was originally written in 2008 and later updated and published in 2011. Tom notes that the company had grown from four to twenty-six employees (GitHub now has over 5,000 developers).
Reflections: All 10 lessons still hold up. While many are startup-oriented (Start Early, Adapt to Your Customers, You Don’t Need Venture Capital), they’re still broadly insightful. I particularly like Have Fun, Deploy at Will, and Trust Your Team.
From Hire Through Open Source:
The lesson here is that it’s far easier and less risky to hire based on relevant past performance than it is to hire based on projected future performance.
Always Do Extra
By: Ben Northrop
Ben explores a trait he sees in most good engineers he knows. When choosing between doing Nothing, More, or Extra, they always choose Extra.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that there is at least one thing that seems to be common to every good, veteran programmer I know. They all follow the same deliberate and dare-I-say selfish rule to how they approach their time: Always do Extra.
So what is Extra? It’s the work you choose after completing a reasonable amount of your normal tasks. Your options then are:
- Nothing – Watch YouTube, buy groceries on Amazon
- More – Continue with the same type of work (e.g., another frontend view)
- Extra – Work related to your job, but outside the current project or sprint. For example: exploring telemetry libraries or optimizing database queries.
In think Ben’s observation is true, from experience, with many great engineers leaning towards Extra when possible. I’ve been reading a lot of Sean Goedecke lately, and I think the concepts of Normal Work and Nothing/More/Extra fit nicely with his ideas from The Spotlight. Sean suggests keeping your typical workload at 80–90% (Normal Work) capacity so that when the spotlight hits, you can accelerate to 110–120%. I think this could be done by doing 10-20% Extra work during calmer periods instead of More, and thus (hopefully) saving your energy and improves your skills for when it matters.
Another thought from the article’s comments, I would add a fourth category
- Other – Work unrelated to your current assignment or company. For example, learning native app development or studying data science. This kind of work can be deceptive, it can feel like Extra, but often has little actual value for your current employer.
Other reading
- The Power of Ten Minutes a Day – Alex Allain – on habit building and writing a book, ten minutes at a time. Linked to Dimitar’s article:
- The Blinking Cursor and the Hot Towel – Dimitar Simeonov – on habit formation and using hot towels as a reward to build a shaving habit.