In my journey looking for the best way to manage my to-do list, I recently tried to create a Trello board where to put all the new tasks added to my personal backlog. My choice of using Trello was based on several needs:
Being able to follow up all the in progress tasks
Being able to order tasks by priorities
Since Trello is very flexible, I thought that I could create one card by item and three columns: to-do, work in progress, and done. But then, I started to have lots of cards in my to-do column and thought I needed to re-order all the cards to be able to quickly see which have a high priority and which can wait.
I first tried to create an intermediate to-do column called “today” where to put the item I needed to be done by the end of the day. I quickly found out I still had to deal with all the other cards in the “to-do” column which needed review each morning. Thus, I moved once again and created three to-do column :
Backlog
Priority #3
Priority #2
Priority #1
For a while, this system seems perfect. Each time I had completed a task, I was able to see which one will be the next to focus on by looking at the priority #1 column. I had a clear view of what I really needed to do at any time. Every week or so, I reviewed my to-do lists in order to move cards from lower priority to higher. Or, at the contrary, I lowered the priority of some tasks considering they were supposed to be priority #1 but I hadn't time to work on it and the world didn't stop.
The more I talk with engineering managers around me - in my own company, during interviews or around a beer - the more I see tow patterns, two different ways to talk about their team: those who say “they” about people they manage and those who included themselves in a global “we”.
I recently had to refactor the way one of my app print logs. My idea was to use logrus as it is a very well known lib to produce logs with Go.
Logrus let you print nicely color-coded and structured logs and is completely API compatible with the standard library logger.
My first question was about log level and how to setup it once across all sub-directory/package of my project.
Under the hood, logrus instantiate a new variable log. Once done, calling the logrus.SetLevel() function will store the level directly in this newly instantiated struct.
Thus, we have a global struct, available across all sub-package making the level automatically shared without having to use dependency injection.
If you need to set a different level in a sub-package (for example), you just need to instantiate a new logger :
var log = logrus.New()
//...
log.Debug("debug log")
The performance review is a common way to regularly give or get feedback about the work that has been done. Some company performs those once a year, other twice a year. Agile teams may do it more frequently. In my previous experiences, the retrospective we were doing after each sprint was a way to give personal feedback, and once a year we were doing a yearly retrospective to summarize the whole past year, as a team.
