What is the purpose of being an engineering manager? After studying it for a while, I realize that there is a strong reason to believe that it is very much similar to the responsibility of a teacher to their students, a coach to their athletes, and a mentor to their mentees.
Previously, I have shown that running VPN all the time on modern smartphones should not cause any battery concern. In this follow-up, rather than using a commercial VPN service, we look at the simple steps to set up an OpenVPN ourselves.
The use of Kanban boards is fairly popular in the context of a sprint-style software development, as a form of a lightweight project management. Extending the use of Kanban boards to handle general management tasks will give the benefit of encouraging transparency and promoting accountability.
While Linux text-oriented command-line tools run natively on Windows 10 these days, there is also the possibility of running the graphical applications which use X11. All we need is the corresponding X Server on the Windows side.
A simple software project with one developer working on it, perhaps it is you and your open-source project, does not need an elaborated description of its progress. In fact, the state of your project can be binary, either it is still in development or it is available for the public consumption. But once the team grows, the complexity increases, and the project starts to become an amalgamation of a few subcomponents, the clarity around the development status, particularly towards its release, is crucial for all the involved stakeholders.
High-end smartphones, such as the latest Apple iPhone and Google Pixel 2, offer the so-called Portrait Mode when taking pictures. This mode blurs the background so that the foreground object stands out, thereby creating a professional-looking photo with almost zero effort. Fortunately, this act of blurring the background also reducing the size of the JPEG file of that picture.
We are notoriously bad at password hygiene. Yet, it is crucial for our digital lives. How many of us managed to convince our friends and family members to use a strong and unique password for every service which they use? How about the grumpy response when you suggest them to always use a password manager for everything?
Because the particular nebulous definition of cloud computing, an organization which does not carefully perform a proper assessment typically ends up using sub-optimal cloud services. A very common mistake is to stick with IaaS, while moving to SaaS can yield a better outcome for all parties involved.
Many forms of technical communication (functional specification, sprint planning, test plan, etc) need to demonstrate clarity. Unfortunately, clarity is often sacrificed – sometimes unconsciously – by an excessive use of ambiguous references.
Professional public speakers are always confident in their delivery. For the rest of us mere mortals, the confidence level can be boosted by our ability to maintain eye contact and demonstrate a good posture. Of course, it also helps to avoid any speech fillers as best as possible.
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