Hey friend, In the last Mektup, I talked about proactive mentorship and what makes a mentor great. Let's continue with coaching and teaching and the differences between all three. Mentorship is the first step any engineer takes. Almost all senior engineers are somehow expected to mentor others. And rarely expected...
Enabling teams consist of experts in a subtopic where deep expertise is required. These teams take pressure from stream-aligned teams by doing research and guiding them in certain areas. Enabling teams join stream-aligned teams, share their knowledge, and leave. I've never come across any team like that. I believe...
Hey friend, I've been mentoring people all around the world for a while. As I stepped into the management role, I also started coaching people in my team who were already mentors. When I started mentoring, I thought it would be less work for me as a mentor and a lot of work for the mentee. It seemed logical to...
Stream-aligned teams are the most common but most mistaken teams. They are the bones of any organization, yet I have seen they often have many problems because other team topologies don't exist, and organizations work only with these teams. This strategy becomes the major bottleneck for faster delivery. It results...
The pre-maturely decided team structures often fail sooner than expected. Teams have to be formed around a vision of a domain. While forming any team, we must consider which dependencies the team will have, the cultural and technical maturity of team members, and the organization's size. We must make conscious...
Ad-hoc team design sounds excellent for solving a problem or delivering a specific project part. However, in this situation, many things appear as an afterthought. Because each team builds tech debt and tries to solve it after some time. When people leave the team, and a few people are destined to maintain all...
In theory, having team APIs is great and can work in relaxed times. Defining and enforcing them is tricky in a dynamic company that changes every few months. Team APIs need a constant team with a consistent push to follow the APIs. In practice, it is difficult. Another part is who will be responsible for keeping...
Hey friend, Today, I wanted to write you about mentoring, but this seemed more suitable for the current tech scene. As many companies take a look at how to use their workforce more effectively to increase profits and cut costs, I wanted to write about something that disturbs me a lot. It’s not difficult to guess...
Too Few Processes is Chaos; Too Many Won't Move Anything Hey friend, Two Mektups ago, I mentioned a mindset that engineers should develop: process thinking. This one is a bit tricky because it’s one of the areas where software engineers can easily get lost. They either get into creating too many processes or resist...
I’ve been thinking about drug usage for a while and never had a chance to have an open conversation with anyone for a long time until recently. I wondered for a long time if drug users think about the background of the drug they use or not. If people thought about the others who are killed/injured and families...
Hey friend, In the last Mektup, I talked about product thinking. That struck a chord on HackerNews, and thousands of people read and commented on it. I haven’t read the comments yet. I always have mixed feelings about comments (stress/curiosity/doubt) on HN; that’s why I’m waiting a bit. With that, this month my...
Hey friend, Up until my mid-level engineering, I didn’t think about the product. My focus was on writing good code, designing software well, and delivering it on time. Clean and readable code, decoupling dependencies and sub-systems, adapting to changes that Apple announced (I was an iOS engineer), and learning...
