Miria Grunick

This morning I've got a guest post on Google's Open Source Programs Office blog: what to do when your open source contribution stalls out. There are posts and posts about how to improve contributor experiences from the maintainer side, but I couldn't find much about how to push through a rough contribution process from the contributor side. Turns out you, as a contributor, actually have quite a lot of power here! I wrote down some of the strategies that have worked for me and my team as we contribute to the Git project; they apply for open source work, but also for any kind of decision stalling out. https://lnkd.in/g3eD6W4N

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> "Note that different people tend to be drawn to different ends of these trade-offs. For example, TPMs typically are drawn to the “control” side and prototyping engineers are typically drawn to the “autonomy” end. This means that people will have their ego attached to one end of the trade-off, making the debate — especially if it frames the question as a binary and not a trade-off — somewhat emotionally charged." Leading a team can be especially tricky when team members hold strong, opposing viewpoints. The key, at least in my opinion, lies in prioritising a collaborative approach that emphasizes small, iterative steps, regular evaluation, and a shared goal of creating value for users/customers, not winning internal debates.

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Protip: If you use a 3rd-party API in your app, check in frequently. APIs change. One of my favorite projects, my resume map (https://lnkd.in/g8zbx_H), was based on Mapbox's Javascript library and used Stamen's toner map. Stamen decided to shift their tile service to Stadia Maps. Mapbox decided to update its library and rebrand it as MapLibre. Ever break all the things? So, after a few quick updates, it's back online, just as pretty as it ever was. #map #maplibre #stamen #stadia #gis

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Project update! My application tracking extension is now doing fuzzier matching and injecting new information into LinkedIn (and other sites) to keep me from doubling up on applications. Next up: local storage and bulk import/export operations...

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🚨 I took down a major piece of infrastructure as a tech lead at Yahoo! and didn’t get fired…. I think this is the nightmare scenario for engineers - to not only break your own product, but to do broader carnage to systems at the company. I think we all fear what the repercussions are if we do this. However, when intent is good, recovery is swift and learnings documented, these things are actually quite formative. When it happened, I was able to remain calm and walk through a rollback in 2 minutes, which allowed the downstream infrastructure to recover in about 10 minutes. This was also the start to my reputation as a level-headed technical leader. Good relationships with my peers in the infrastructure team allowed us to quickly diagnose that my code push was the cause of the incident and take action. I was leading a team building a very powerful piece of software. We had a client library that was installed on every server and allowed us to push out front-end code to every web property simultaneously. Code changes would propagate in about 2 minutes from push. It allowed us to provide a consistent branding, search and navigation system.  Because we understood the power of the system, we also had plans in place if something went wrong and had practiced rollback and forwards. Typically, when things went wrong, they were minor UX bugs in the interface. Medium problems cost us some dollars in search revenues. However, this time, my change had a massive impact downstream. I had added a new polling feature that worked against the caching strategy of the platform I was calling. Within 2 minutes of diagnosis I executed the rollback strategy. The bad news was the product manager had to wait a few more days for the new feature to roll again respecting the caching strategy of the platform. The good news is that we recovered quickly. I learned a few lessons from this outage: 🚨 Outages happen all the time and you will likely not lose your job if you cause one. 📝 Your team should have plans should an outage happen how you will approach debugging and recovery. ⏰ Practice for urgent situations before they occur. 🏋‍♀️ Building and maintaining strong connections with leads of systems where you have dependency is key. 🧞‍♀️ I have a special ability to appear completely calm while feeling absolute panic inside, which is a good capability to have. 

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Whew, fellow engineering managers, do we need to talk? We had more yeses to these three questions than either front-line engineers OR execs: 📈 I do not feel the potential for advancement in my current role 🚀 Leadership at my company is out of the loop when it comes to engineering challenges 💥 I do not feel secure in my current role. Pair that with the 69% of EMs who’ve experienced burnout in the past year and it’s enough to make even the best of us look at the engineer/manager pendulum with renewed interest. For me, the saving grace is the big improvements we as an engineering industry have made on informing and driving the business strategy over the decades I’ve been in tech, and wanting to stay in the room where it happens. Check out the 2024 State of Engineering Management to think about where you and your team falls on the trends we're all experiencing firsthand. (And for funsies, you won’t believe which group thinks AI is a gimmick. ✨)

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In Search and Rescue we have a saying "slow is smooth and smooth is fast". The same mindset can be applied to #SoftwareEngineering. Have urgency and bias towards action, but don't rush. Find the root cause. Fix it once. Fix it right. An extra few cycles now will make you faster in the long run.

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After being promoted to Pricipal Engineer, I felt conflicted about this for a long time. Sometimes I still do. It's weird to suddenly be acknowledged, valued, and reqarded for the many other skills you can bring to the table, after being borderline-traumatized for so long into acting as nothing more than a lean, mean, code-committing machine. Engineering ICs get promoted repeatedly for doing deeper and more impactful technical work and adhering to a strict schedule and set of work items, keep up a high code commit rate, while even being frequently penalized along the way for letting their focus stray, missing deadlines, taking time to refactor or add tests, going off schedule a bit to help someone else on another team solve a problem, or pointing out absurdities with processes or tooling. Companies teach them to function as islands, stay in their lane, don't do anything extra, and do not under any circumstances rock the boat! ...only to suddenly find themselves one day expected to do the exact opposite: take a broad view, opportunistically connect the dots, swoop in and help in concentrated doses to keep others unblocked, write proposals you won't be single-handedly implementing or even driving, identify and come up with solutions to absurdities that impede the business, help the engineering organization scale up and work more efficiently, help other teams, bring in new industry best practices and third-party technologies, help prioritize company investments and resource allocations based on intersecting business needs with technical realities, etc.. Wouldn't it be great if the lower levels in the standard Software Engineer career development path emphasized and rewarded more than just being a code monkey? Then once someone reached Staff or Principal, it wouldn't be such a sudden shock and U-turn.

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I will add one more thing. The code review should be the last line of defense, not the first. The design should be correct and reviewed (if need be) and the code should be correct as much as the ability and knowledge of the author allows.

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> "Wartime stretches and strains Engineering Managers especially hard because they receive pressure from above and below. By ruthlessly focusing on well-aligned delivery, building a resilient team, investing in individuals, and maintaining your own health, you can lead your team to not just survive but thrive under pressure. Keep calm, "lean into the suck", and trust that you've got what it takes. Your people count on you." In this article Péter Szász outlines practical advice for engineering managers in crisis situations, drawing from his own experiences. Péter identifies a key concept: during "wartime," focus on what's essential, moving quickly, and making decisions without being bogged down by perfectionism. When everything is urgent, prioritisation is critical—managers need to be ruthless about what gets attention, ensuring alignment with the most important business objectives. Team resilience becomes paramount in crises. I completely agree when Péter emphasizes the importance of maintaining a healthy, functional team despite mounting pressures. Leaders must foster an environment that supports well-being and personal growth, even when times are tough. This involves transparency, providing context for decisions, and showing empathy, as teams tend to trust leaders more when they feel included in the process. At the same time, they should continue to encourage a sense of ownership, so each team member feels empowered to contribute, even under stress. Péter also touches on the personal toll leadership can take in high-pressure situations. Leaders need to take care of their own mental and physical health to avoid burnout and remain effective. He suggests that managers assess their limits, manage expectations, and delegate where possible to maintain a sustainable work environment. This particular point hammered home for me since we've been dealing with a crisis at work recently and an area I overlooked was my own well being. Ultimately, Péter's approach is to balance urgent decision-making with long-term team care, ensuring that immediate problems are solved while protecting the team's future potential. The article also provides tactical advice for maintaining momentum, such as reducing the dependency on meetings, breaking down tasks into manageable chunks, and keeping the team focused on solving the right problems. https://lnkd.in/euapKeKQ

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I’m intrigued by the internals of JAX’s transformations, such as jax.grad and jax.jit. JAX’s documentation briefly introduces the concept of a **Tracer**—a stand-in for JAX Arrays that records execution progress and captures information about intermediate results. Here’s a simple code snippet that reveals some intriguing properties of Tracers: 1. Each transformation relies on a specific type of tracer. For instance, jax.jit uses DynamicJaxprTrace, while jax.grad utilizes JVPTrace. 2. When we compose transformations, such as jax.jit(jax.grad(f)), the traces are composed—meaning the primals in JVPTrace are traced with DynamicJaxprTrace.

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I rarely post on LinkedIn, but I'm curious to find some folks to chat with about some ideas for an Enterprise Product Management product. My thesis is that the current suite of tools do not do a sufficient job providing features for managing sprawling, complex suites of products + product lines that mature tech organizations maintain. Most PM products are geared toward startups and smaller companies with simpler products, but few tools help PMs and other leaders manage the sprawling complexity of a situation like 30 products over 6 product lines, 14 industry solutions, and components from a dozen acquisitions. Let me know if you'd be down to chat for 20 minutes one day about it!

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In other news today, Delta Lake UniForm is now Generally Available. No more data silos, interoperability FTW! UniForm allows you to use a single table format for your lakehouse, getting the top-of-the-line performance and features of Databricks and Delta Lake, but being able to access the data using *any* engine that supports *any* of the common lakehouse formats Delta Lake, Iceberg, or Hudi.

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I don’t post a lot on LinkedIn. I find a lot of the posts are obvious statements of well known ideas or successes. I’ve decided to start posting on LinkedIn, to share, to vent, to find a little group therapy so to speak. I’ve been managing software engineers for over 10 years now. Coming from an IC background, making the transition from IC to a first line manager hasn’t been easy, but it has been rewarding. I don’t read a lot of books, in fact, just a few, and not really related to software engineering or management or the like. Most of my experience has been self learned, through failures, through mistakes; hard knox so to speak. I like leading a team, but don’t feel like a leader. I position myself as a team member on a team that has joint responsibility for success and failure. Leading by example when I can, and being led by others at times. Of course I get to make some of the decisions, but I rather see the team lead itself. It is more rewarding that way. What I find most intriguing is that one size does not fit all. The hardest part of managing is the people. Each person is unique with different experiences, different motivations, different ethnicity, different backgrounds, different home lives. You aren’t given a prebuilt team that is optimal for success. You are given the raw materials, some that are a good match for the job and others that need to be coached, developed, and nurtured. None of my team members ever took a compatibility test to determine how well they’d work with me or each other. Some are meticulous in the way they operate, some are “cowboys” (sorry for the gender team). Some can deal with ambiguity, the technical complexity, the problem solving, the scale, the quality, etc. Some need to be shown how to unblock themselves, how to find a way forward with little experience or the lack of confidence. Some flourish in an environment full of chaos, others struggle. What makes a puzzle interesting is that it takes different shapes and sizes and time to solve. Apparently there is a character limit on posts. This is my first post, it is raw and unfiltered (no help from ChatGPT). It probably lacks context and clarity, but might resonate with some. I’ll post a continuation in the coming days to help tie these thoughts together with other thoughts still yet to come.

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"Curiosity over tenure" -- use quality telemetry in your traces to make debugging accessible. Empower curious folks to debug, not just the most tenured person on the team/company. Metrics are great... they're cheap, enable high data retention, but they're coarse... too coarse to understand what's happening in your system. If you're solely reliant on metrics, you'll need lots of intuition and tenure to understand what's going on in the system. "Oh... it's the cache" says the hero on the team peering over a graph, and doing some inaccessible pattern matching. It looks cool, but it's not scalable. Adding lots of telemetry to your traces ensures anyone with a curious mind can understand what's going on in your system.

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"Your main job is to make your product win." I think this should apply to any product that your company makes. I also like what he says following this statement about what is NOT your main job. I will summarize here: "Your main job is not to make your manager happy, it is not to make execs happy." Also, note, this main job doesn't only apply to PMs, but also to senior Engineering Managers, Tech Leads, and Designers. #makeyourproductwin #leadership

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Super interesting (and technical) breakdown on how the folks at ClickHouse are transforming the simple, flexible JSON format into something that can be leveraged at hyperscale. An excellent example of how sometimes scale can make you do crazy things.

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