One of the biggest struggles in engineering at most large companies I’ve worked for is visibility across teams/orgs. Two jobs back, I was at one such company and the project I was supporting had a crazy number of teams involved. I used the blog in my personal Confluence space to start sharing weekly updates for each of the teams I led. In addition to the obvious status related things, I always included a data section and a gratitude section. These were my favorite. I’d dig through data from different systems to find stats that were interesting or surprising. I almost always learned something in the process. As for gratitude, taking time at the end of each week to think of and highlight all the things to be grateful for is just a rather nice practice.
I didn’t think to grab a copy of any of these when I left that company and a handful of times I’ve regretted it. Today though, I learned that all my posts still exist! I had a brief chance to look through them and be reminded just how many projects we were juggling! I’m glad the posts are still there though. I’d like to use them as a template for something in the future.
I usually included some silly thing at the end of each post, like this XKCD comic. (The early days of the pandemic were pretty wild.)
