An answer Jason’s question “What did you learn in 2022?”

Product

I’m 6 months into working for a product company, the longest I’ve spent doing daily work on a single product
Software architecture & refactoring works are ongoing. There’s never really a start or stop date
Let your customers outgrow you

Product Books

Spotify Teardown

Devops

MTTR > MTBF - Optimising Mean Time To Recovery is more important than trying to minimise Mean Time Between Failures.

Linux

Wrote my first bash script!

Architecture

DDD
Various AWS bits, preparing for Solutions Architecture exam

Organisation Design

It seems this topic is pretty closely related to software architecture.

Reckoning with Conway’s Law - thoughtworks podcast featuring James Lewis & Martin Fowler
Other Dan North & James Lewis stuff
ING bank - A Case study of ING bank and their experiments with team topologies.
Patterns of effective teams - A talk by Dan North about ways you can organise your teams for success.

Organisation Design Books

Team topologies
Accelerate - referenced heavily in the conference circle, podcasts, articles, other books. This book is a must read
Working Backwards - Current read

Cognitive Load

A topic related to organisation design & architecture. Learning about cognitive load theory was pretty insightful, applicable to many areas of life.

This idea was introduced to me by James Lewis while discussing his experience & research on Team Topologies, software architecture, & complexity science.

UX

User Experience continues to be a topic of interest. 2022 observations focused on the UX music apps mostly.

I wrote about dark patterns

Some stuff I read

Leadership

Engineering Management for the rest of us - this book was a lovely read
Managing client relationships (as a consultant)

Productivity

Saying no, increased focus, reduced involvement in multiple projects in fly at once.
Applying shape up
How to read

2022 Learning Summary