Announcing: Egoless Engineering, a tech enablement handbook

I spend a lot of my time writing, reading, thinking. Often I write to solve problems: either my own problems, or to help others solve their own problems. Writing is a big part of my role at Schibsted, and it’s been a big part of my open source work too.

So I've decided to write a book! I already have approx 60% of what I have planned. It's a book I can summarize by these two paragraphs, from a previous blog post:

At the start of my career, my ego was absolutely my worst quality. I had to be right, every time. I had to “win” every disagreement. I suspect it was big-fish-small-pond syndrome. Through learning to disagree with my peers and friends in healthy ways, I've mostly ditched that. No longer do I care about being right. I instead care that things are done in a way that improves the organisation, the code, and employee happiness.

I take joy from things being done well, by people who enjoy what they're doing. If I can lift people up so that they can do both, I have succeeded in my role as “Tech Enabler". The essence of Egoless Engineering.

Once finished, I will release the HTML version for free, with an ebook/print version for some minimal cost for those who might want it. I don't plan for huge success, I just hope I can help others do some things better.

If that sounds interesting to you, sign up to be notified when it comes out here.

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To give you a taste of some chapters so far:

• Philosophy

  • Principles for tech enablement

  • In the background vs in the foreground

• Teambuilding

  • Creating lasting teams

  • Overcoming difficult situations

  • Arguments vs disagreements

  • Taking an authoritative voice

  • Mentorship

• Frameworks and tools I use

  • Lean, BMC, RAT, etc

  • Design thinking

  • Cynefin

  • Facilitation

• Hands-on development

  • How I code

  • Open source

• Warstories

  • The time a service hit MAX_INT on index key on a write-heavy DB

  • Malware that only worked on 3g

  • Exiting a user-response script if they had an invalid email without saving their responses

  • When a domain was not set to auto-renew

I have more planned, but I intend for the final thing to be a mixture of stories, practical advice, and reflections.

So yeah: sign up to be notified when it comes out here.