Michael Sherov

Do you think you need to hire developers as w2 employees to build a highly-skilled, devoted and culturally aligned team? Let Blueprint show you otherwise. Here's how we're changing the game: 1️⃣ Unmatched Quality: Quality is our creed. Our vetting process includes interviewing with former CTOs and senior software engineers, ensuring only top-tier talent makes it to your team. 2️⃣ Long-Term Commitment: Forget the turnover and churn worries! Our developers stay longer than industry norms for W2 developers (average tenure of 2.2 years), providing stability and continued expertise to your projects. 3️⃣ Cultural Integration: Culture isn't just an add-on for us. We dive deep to understand your core values and ensure every developer we match with your team enhances and embraces your company culture. 4️⃣ Equity is Optional: Save your cap table for your growing startup! We ensure that our developers are passionate believers in your product right from the start - without incentivizing them with equity. We rigorously test for craftsmanship, ensuring they value not just a quality end result but also the journey of creation. 🌟 Shoot us a DM to connect and see how we can improve your staffing strategy. #StaffAugmentation #InnovationInStaffing #TechTalent #CultureFit #LongTermGrowth

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Alistair Gray gave a great talk at Write The Docs Portland, going into detail about our investment in Internal Docs at Stripe. He breaks down our thoughts about issues of fragmentation, discoverability, and document quality - and how we’ve tried to build great tools to improve the state of internal docs at Stripe across all of these axes. In Q&A, he touches on an important theme which is essentially “how do we convince engineers to use the tooling we build.” The answer really boils down to “ruthlessly build what engineers want” while maintaining our core primitives (eg, ownership, doc quality) that we know are vital to the health of Stripe’s knowledge base all-up. Let me know if y’all have any questions - happy to expand more on these themes! https://lnkd.in/em4QRFmH

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Product Rockstars in tech....It's not about strategy. It's not about frameworks. To play big...it's about the soft skills. Yep....your EQ is critical to level up and lead. You need to master the human side of work.  Treating people with respect Understanding how to communicate Executive presence Managing politics (yep...,I said it) Treating people as human beings To level up in the world of tech....it's about the human game. #productmanagement #techleaders #womenintech Are you ready to level up into leadership? Are you ready to learn how to play the human game? Respond with 'yes' and I'll send you my E-Book on The Next Generation of Leadership in Product

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For years, I've led and mentored diverse teams of software engineers, and one gripe consistently surfaces, irrespective of team makeup or project nuances: "Why do I have to resolve conflicts when cherry-picking commits from the master branch?" 🤔 This complaint hits home. Engineers crave independence to innovate and deliver swiftly, yet software development thrives on collaboration, demanding robust code management and teamwork. 🚀💻 Cherry-picking commits can be an efficient way to incorporate specific changes or bug fixes into a hotfix branch or release candidate, but it often triggers conflicts as changes collide with ongoing developments. This conflict resolution process can be time-consuming, error-prone, and frustrating for engineers, detracting from their productivity and morale. 😫⚔️ The absence of a structured cherry-picking process exacerbates the problem. Here's a simple fix to avoid conflicts: 1️⃣ Track the last merged PR number into the base branch when cutting release/hotfix branches. 2️⃣ When receiving a cherry-pick PR, confirm its base branch PR number. 3️⃣ Ensure all PRs between the last merged and new ones are cherry-picked before merging, preventing conflicts. 4️⃣ Once merged, update the base PR number of the last merged cherry-pick for the next cherry-pick PR review can be verified. Yes, adopting this process entails a bit of change, but the dividends in smoother workflows and happier engineers are well worth it. Let's make life easier for our fellow coders! 💪🛠️ #SoftwareEngineering #CodeReview #Collaboration #ConflictResolution #Teamwork #DeveloperLife #CherryPicking #CodeManagement #ProductivityTips #EngineeringCulture #TechTips #Mentorship #WorkflowOptimization #CodingCommunity

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Want to know more about How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale? Still skeptical of why we built horizontal sharding on RDS instead of <insert-cooler-database-technology>? Wondering if you should copy what we did? Check out out my new podcast with Software Engineering Daily as we dive deep on spicy stories that didn't make the blog post from surviving my first Figma Config conference to debating which database technology comes out on top. https://lnkd.in/gFfh7C-A

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⛔️ Fear of failure will destroy your career before it starts. Most people quit. Maybe they get overwhelmed by the research and differing opinions. Maybe close friends say its too hard, or give examples of why they will fail. If you assume failure and are around people that encourage a negative viewpoint, it'll be a lot harder for you to make progress. But what if you succeed? What if it does work out? I know for me, I spend a lot of time thinking about the "what if it works" scenario. I used to be an office assistant. 👉🏾 I'm a firm believer that consistency and work ethic will breed consistent results. Maybe things won't work as fast as you'd like, but it will work. 👉🏾 Don't fail because you chose to fail. Surround yourself with doers. The rewards are worth the struggle. #mentormesh

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If feedback is a gift, why does it keep punching us in the face? “Your test coverage didn’t grow as much as we asked, you should care about quality more.” “You should be be better prepared for our meeting.” “You should care enough about this company to pick up the phone when I call you at 7pm.” “Why so serious? Lighten up, you should smile more!” When you think about it: why do we feel the need to repeat this “feedback is a gift” mantra over and over again? If feedback is so obviously a gift, would it need to announce itself so explicitly, or are we just gaslighting ourselves? Slap in the face. “Ouch that hurts!” “No, no, it’s a gift!” Classic.

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To stay relevant, you have to get your hands dirty and feel the pain. Engineering leaders typically amplify the team to maximize impact. However, being detached from the problem or not feeling the pain could easily end up leading the team down the wrong path (solving the wrong problems, etc). Even with reports, you should still spend time to understand your product and talk to the users. Your PMs, QAs, UXes, engineers relaying the feedback to you does not replace your own opinion and definitely does not represent fully your end users. Some things I have tried that helped me (as an engineer): 1. Use your product. When was the last time you actually use your own product? 2. Read (and write) code. At the very least, write prototype code. When was the last time you actually make a decision grounded by technical evidence instead of theory? 3. Talk to the users, read feedback from users. You will find that what the team's echo chamber may be very different from what the end users are saying. What else YOU have done to distinguish yourself from armchair strategists? ### Inspiration came from that Google Chrome is crashing frequently on IME input changes. I decided to get the crash dump so I can at least find out what is causing the crash ... reminds me of the old times doing windows crash dump analyses in bulk Costco style. #randomthoughts #leadership #beinghandson

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Here's one fun and easy hack that designers and product managers can use to GREATLY level up their technical chops: Learn how to use Airtable. Why? It's a hands-on way to learn the fundamentals of relational databases, data types, and database querying. Knowing these concepts intuitively will benefit your working relationship with devs and make you MUCH more effective at your job. Here are some easy database project ideas to get you started: 1. Your Library -- Books, authors, genres, etc. 2. Trips You've Taken -- Locations visited, travel companions, experiences, etc. 3. Recipes -- Types of food, ingredients, kitchen tools needed, etc. Have fun! https://www.airtable.com DM me if you want to learn Airtable and need tips on getting started. Happy to help. #Airtable #Data #ProductManagement #UX #CareerGrowth

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Here's something counterintuitive; taking on more investment risk reduces long-term returns: https://lnkd.in/gHwkjHmP This is only my second investment video, so I'm still learning. If you have any feedback, I would love to hear it. Based on the feedback from the first video, I tried to make the audio more balanced on this video. I also shortened the length, to make the content more digestible.

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Normally I'm a huge, huge fan of John Cutler and his newsletter, which you *should* subscribe to if you want to learn how to be an effective dev or PM. However, his missive yesterday is off the mark. What he's observing is 100% a failure of leadership. People can blame the tools all they want, but if you're not creating a culture that supports these principles they go nowhere. https://lnkd.in/gdCg3-VR #PMI #softwaredevelopment #productmanagement #agile

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I'm really happy with how my talk on Scaling (or...don't) has come together. Here's a sneak peek of one of the slides -- the steps we all know and love about scaling a company ;-) #bsw2024 #BoulderStartupWeek

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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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How do you select the appropriate metrics for your team? How do you evaluate your team's performance as you strive for excellence and maintain their buy-in and trust? I will be on a LeadDev panel next month to discuss all of these topics. I hope to see you there.

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Complexity is accidental if it is not inherent in the problem your software solves for the user, but rather stems only from the chosen implementation. The accumulation of accidental complexity is Entropy. When I find myself saying "this is a stupid problem to have" it's usually due to uncovering accidental complexity. How do you combat software entropy?

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Familiarity Levels at Work, and Meeting Scheduling Novice: You are surprised by their calendar blocks Journeyman: You already schedule around their blocks Expert: You know why those blocks exist and when they are negotiable Elite: Already synced over chat

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By actively working to broaden their perspectives, managers can enhance their strategic thinking and make more informed, balanced, and effective decisions. This, in turn, can lead to better organizational performance and a more resilient and adaptive business strategy.

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Does anyone else remember sitting in class thinking, "Am I ever going to actually use this?" 🤦‍♂️ I still ask myself this weekly when reading blog posts, listening to podcasts, catching up on massive Slack threads, or diving into documentation and feature listings. I don't always use the info, but it feels great when a memory from six months ago suddenly becomes relevant. I always think of that original Jurassic Park Unix scene. This often happens when discussing DevOps and Serverless, where boundaries blur already. Trying to keep all of the AWS documentation in my head while discussing the design of new features and optimizations feels like a superhuman task. What are some things you wish you had remembered when solving an issue or problem? For me, we designed a Lambda function to fail purposefully instead of attempting to recover for efficiency. Unfortunately, the Lambda control plane self-throttles a function once a failure threshold is reached... slowing our processing to a crawl and forcing some quick code changes. 😅 #AWS #lambda #serverless #learninginpublic #hugops

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