Forem: amcasari 🦕

(Not Required) "README" for Managers

amcasari 🦕 — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 21:40:15 +0000

There are as many reasons as not to create documents about your core beliefs, personal mission, and working style.

When you manage a team that cannot frequently sit in the same place, it is important to create documentation that allows your team to reference that useful thing you said once in a team meeting or 1:1.

My format changes over time, but key sections I always recommend:

Your core professional values (as a manager, leader, person, etc)
Tips for people onboarding to working with you to set reasonable expectations
Your expectations as a manager that may not be written in an issue tracker or HR document
Areas that light up your brain (where someone can find common ground with you)

I keep this mostly as an internal document, since the target audience are people on my team or those thinking about working with me. Publicly, one version of this can be found as a Gist.

my (current) Manager (Not Required) README

My core values

Enable a growth mindset
A team is more than a collection of individuals
Sustainability is always a priority
Give cover for calculated risks
Build soapboxes, shine spotlights

On working with me (and space i’ll definitely give you)

I work spiky :) This is sometimes due to personal commitments, community organization work, talks, coffees, my brain getting interrupted by things that are not specifically helping me to achieve the deep concentration or mundane task accomplishment that I need to at the time.
Finding me at a given time can be challenging. I am doing my best to keep my calendar up to date with personal commitments, WF[x] where x = TLA for office location
Am I OOO? (Hooray for me!) [internal doc] can help you find a person who is not me to help you on X.

on team culture

I don’t believe that people fit in boxes. People aren't defined by check boxes and surveys. I actively rail against managers trying to make squishy people into squares that fit into the spreadsheet of a team.
I think of teams like moss gardens. I look for gaps, try to understand the shape of that gap, then look for humans seem capable of growing to fill that gap. Then I watch them grow, see their directions, and try to guide based on where they find air + energy. I am not perfect. I make lots of mistakes. I am learning constantly.
Building a psychologically safe, effective, distributed, asynchronous team is harder than any other professional challenge I have faced. But this is what I am here for. This is my hill right now.
Psych safety in our team means building a team culture where people can be present externally + internally, in different time zones + communication channels, and where dissenting voices or those impacted by acts of others are able to voice that in forums without feeling 'othered'. This is a challenge for all of us.

General managery bits

More frequent check-in's > If you need time with me more frequently than bi-weekly, that’s fine! Let’s talk about how we can balance check-ins to make you feel supported and able to move quickly. I will always find time for at least a quick VC.
On feeling overwhelmed > Scaling back is always okay. If you feel like you are being pulled in too many directions at once, we need to check in on your time, capacity + priorities. I never want you to feel like you have impossible choices to make or that you are not able to be effective with all that is being asked of you. It’s not a burden and is my job to help you focus your energy and impact.
On ruthlessly prioritizing > I am a big advocate of this and still very much growing in this area. I promise that I am better at helping you do this then I might be doing it for myself. Again, never a burden. I want to make sure that you are focusing on the right things. It won’t always be what I choose, but I will ask questions and try to help you understand what choices you should be making. Of course, there will be times that I bump things up to deliver on promises we have already made over what might be more exciting projects. Consistently following through on work we start is important. Saying no when we are at capacity is always better than taking on too much.
You are always empowered and encouraged to deflect future work asks + scoping of priorities to me. You don't have to organize the priorities of the product/DPE team yourself. A very handy phrase I expect you to use as often as you need: "I need to check my priorities and capacity with my manager before committing."
On saying yes or no > I will never commit you to work without asking you first. If someone asks me for more, or for additional assistance, you’ll always get a private communication from me checking in on your capacity + interest. If you don’t know your capacity against your current commitments, this is the perfect time to talk about them with me! You can say “I don’t know.”
You are always empowered and encouraged to add me to meetings or calls with the teams you work with. This gives me a better perspective on what is being asked of you and allows me to better scope what resources we need. Never a burden, is my job, and I delight in party invitations.
The collective DevRel commitment and aligning of resources for launches is not on your plate. This is something for the managers to work, especially as we have resource constrained teams. It’s never a negative mark on anyone to pull together the collective people on a launch/project with me and other DevRel managers to make sure we are able to provide a good experience for our developers and with our partners.
Getting more help > Do you need more help for a project? Mentors for a specific language community? Assistance getting your vision for a product experience executed to the level you want to deliver? Excellent! I want to help you find that. Our team is big. Sometimes comms fall through. Don’t lose sleep. Don’t burn out. I want to help you find the help you need.
[deprecated for now] If you are having to WFH as a “work around” to not finding conference rooms, quiet work spaces, or transportation, please use our team’s steam valve to let me know.

on prioritizing EDII + community building

As our team grows, continuing to bring in team members who reflect the intersectionality of our current + future developer communities is one of my highest priorities.

I always view work in building external relationships with developer communities for existing and future customers as vital + essential to our team. The directions that you specifically move is entirely up to you, and I will be interested in hearing about the decision making process you use to determine this.

on taking care of yourself + self-care

I may not always recognize when you are struggling or need more help. You are allowed to say to me “Help, I need help.” without knowing how, why, or what’s going on. I don’t expect you to have all the answers immediately and will do my best to listen (working on this). We’ll find a path forward.
Work-life balance…. I agree with [internal doc]. When you spend personal time for our company, I expect that we will balance that out with your traditional working hours. I can’t add your extra hours in Workday, so we can come to an agreement about how to balance out your unbalanced schedule when it happens. I am vested in your health + success, which means I would prefer that you are not a crispy critter (aka burned out).
Take the time you need during the day to be most effective. Schedule breaks, food, social interaction, perks, team activities, exercise. I trust all of you to be responsible adults who will carve out their general cadence to be healthy, happy, productive people. You have my explicit permission to take care of yourself.
At some point in your life, you may find yourself in the role of caretaker of another adult. This guide, written by an excellent human, is extremely helpful.

on devrel

No one uses our products because they just absolutely love it. People use our products to solve their problems. They adopt different products that help them solve problems in different ways.

We enable adoption by helping developers understand how to use our products to solve their problems. We help our products by shaping the developer experience so that their hard work is as effortless and easy as possible to implement, by making it easy to understand how our products solve their problems, how to get started to find the right choices for themselves, how to know what to do when things go sideways, and how to find human help when the docs aren't enough.
Community organization + involvement in DevRel should be opportunity without obligation.
Get cards, preferably an international style. It’s easier to have them on hand for events than order last minute. [internal doc]

big ideas my brain is working on that I don’t always realize

Lifting up the next generations of developers
Building teams holistically
Evolution of compute-at-scale and open source as complex networks
Impact of pseudo-infinite compute-at-scale for systems where - ML/AI can be unintentionally weaponized against users
Sustainability in open source communities

Get to The Point: The "One-Pager"

amcasari 🦕 — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 16:49:31 +0000

"Some honored me by giving me, the secret of their works" - [32], Sappho

You have an idea you want people to read. You've heard about this thing called a "one-pager". You've heard that this may or may not actually be one page (depending on the margins, the font size, spacing, etc).

The purpose of a "one-pager" is to succinctly describe a problem, why someone should care, and your proposal to address it. You want them to walk away with the why and the what comes next. Quickly.

Here is an outline of the bare essentials, to help you focus your time and energy:

TITLE

Executive Summary

[* DELETE THESE DIRECTIONS - 2-3 sentences with summary of your proposal below]

Problem Statement

[* DELETE THESE DIRECTIONS - 2-3 paragraphs max]

Proposal for Action

[* DELETE THESE DIRECTIONS - 2-3 paragraphs max]

How Do We Define Success?

[* DELETE THESE DIRECTIONS - 2-3 paragraphs max]

Immediate Action Items

[* DELETE THESE DIRECTIONS - 3-4 bullet points of what needs to happen immediately to get your proposal moving]

Frequently Asked Questions

What might people ask about the above?
- We’ll answer it here!
What has someone asked you after reading this brief?
- Answer it here!

Your Network Size is not about Networking

amcasari 🦕 — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 04:01:51 +0000

(Part 1 of the series: Introducing Mathematical Concepts for Confronting a Crisis))

One of the skills you must master as a lifelong professional generalist is how to translate what people around you are saying versus what they mean.

In technology fields, there are terms that we do have consensus on. These can be used in meetings where people of all backgrounds and levels are present without further definition: words like “the”, “and”, “before”, “after”. Other terms, it serves well for us all to define at least once so that we ensure we are all on the same page.

So, let’s kick off this series with the most basic concept of complex networks and network analysis: What is a network?

A network is another mathematical term for a graph, which is how we describe things and the relationships between them. The discrete object in the graph we are trying to describe can be called nodes, vertices, and points. These all mean the same thing. The relationship between these objects can be called edges, links, or lines. These also all mean the same thing. For this series, we will be referring to networks as containing nodes and edges. The size of your network is commonly defined as the number of nodes, or N.

What does this look like in abstract action? Well, think about the network that exists between you and...really, anyone else. Let’s go with someone that you care about and are invested in emotionally.

What is N here? It’s two, because there are two nodes in the network (you plus someone else)

Excellent! Now, what about how we can describe the different degrees of connection? This is where, excitingly, networks start to pick up and become more interesting. We’ll start with a simple connection, the idea that there is any relationship between you and someone else.

We could just stop there. This might be simple enough. The nodes in a network, plus a single edge connecting them. This represents that there are two objects and a relationship that can potentially be described in some way: ephemerally, musically, or preferably mathematically. We call this an undirected, unweighted graph, because there is no concept of directionality in the relationship or any kind of scale for the context that relationship represents.

What if we wanted this direction? We would need a directed graph, one that shows how the relationship is represented from the point of view of the node for an observer. We could then describe the relationship of “us” between two people.

Again, we can stop here, if this is most useful. However, now that we are describing human dynamics and relationships, the energy and space they take up, we could bump up our network to represent the full relationship which looks more like a “you, me, us” network.

Now we can fully represent the following people: you, the other person. This means that we have N = 2, with two nodes. We can also represent that there are in fact five different kinds of relationships at play between you, or five edges: (1) the “we” relationship, (2) your relationship with them, (3) their relationship with you, (4) your relationship with yourself, (5) their relationship with themself.

This is just for ONE relationship in your life! If we were to start extending this to ALL your relationships where you expend energy or are asked for energy from others, you can start to see how and where all your energy flows at any given time. If we were to add any kind of evaluation of how much energy is expended in a relationship, you would see that different edges carry different “weight”. This quantification of the relationship in some mathematical way is what gives us a weighted network. (This also explains why some relationships give you energy, some take more, and sometimes you just need “a break”.)

...okay. Now, you can see how networks are important to describe groups of people. Why is this most important now, in times of pandemic response?

Because...your N matters more now than ever. Specifically, the N that describes your contact with other people in less than a 6-foot radius, which is currently the distance that science is recommending we keep from other people as much as possible.

You need to understand what your N truly is, not what you think it is, most importantly that this could be changing over time.

If you truly self isolate, with no contact from other human beings, you can define yourself as N = 1, for that period of time. If you never sign for a delivery, if you don’t accept takeout from a delivery person within a six foot radius, if you don’t accidentally bump into someone when turning a corner, if you can continue to have everything delivered, you are able to maintain an N = 1.

Now, you might not have an option of N = 1. You might share living space with someone else.

“Yes”, you may say, “but I don’t do need to worry about that. I’m home with:

my roommates
....and we only hang out with our significant others.
my family
....and we only let the kids play next door with our neighbors.”

Start adding up all those “only” moments. Also, add in factors for:

Does anyone in your network have a job they cannot work from home for?
Does anyone need regular treatment that cannot be provided via telehealth that you know about?
Does anyone have medicine that they alone must pick up from the pharmacy?
Does anyone provide emergency care for a friend or neighbor when their loved ones get sick?
Does anyone have to go out to get groceries/supplies/gas/formula/diapers/beer?

THESE ALL COUNT. Your interactions with other people define your N. Their interactions with other people, also define your N. (This is also how many social graphs quickly begin to look like hairballs.)

These connections may not all be sustained. They may never be relevant. There are many, many factors affecting your current N, and your ability to control what the minimum size of the network is that you can maintain. However, given the transmission nature of the current pandemic, knowing your network size and your risk of exposure for the past 14 days is very important.

My goal here is not to shame anyone. It is to make you more conscious about the choices that you do have, the choices that others do not, and how those two can have negative consequences on each other. It is to give you the tools to make a more informed, effective analysis of the environment that you are choosing to create for yourself and the environment that you are creating for others.

This is just step one: seeing your network, defining your interaction system, shifting your mind from focusing on one to many points in the system. This is crucial. We must shift our understanding of the systemic implications of simple actions to see the other side of the inflection point.

Introducing Mathematical Concepts for Confronting a Crisis

amcasari 🦕 — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 03:36:47 +0000

Times are not normal. Evidence of the changing world around us can be found in every news source, every social media channel, every shared photo of a stripped grocery store surfacing around the world. The start of this “not normal” is not evenly distributed. You might be someone who has already been through the first storm, and now you are returning back to a cautious new social pattern. You might be adjusting your expectations to a new daily routine, with constant interruptions or disturbances that were previously not there. Or, maybe you haven’t felt the impact personally yet.

Our ability to see, process, and work through crisis are all as unique as our individual brains and experiences. In a previous life, I spent years training to be the person who had to absorb all of the inputs and react tactically with brilliance and care in moments of crisis. I trained for it, I excelled at it. Unfortunately, not all of my previous experience and mental frameworks I developed that allowed me to be highly effective in a crisis apply here. This is … hard.

What do you do when your previous experience has not adequately prepared you for the current situation? Personally, I’ve been slowly sifting through all the tools I do possess to figure out which ones work best right now.

After unsuccessfully trying a few techniques, I found clarity. When I was in college, I really struggled with some specific areas of study which were highly math-based but always explained through application. It wasn’t until I turned the table and focused on the problem as a math problem (rather than, say, an electrical engineering problem) that I was able to hold the methodology in my head. We do this in other ways: drawing parallels between the things we know how to handle and what we are dealing with now.

This is working best for me now: breaking problems down into mathematical concepts to ground decision making and understand the world around us. As I try to extend this to explain what I am thinking to other people, I realize that my math experience covers concepts that are not as widely studied but are critical to parsing much of the research and recommendations during a global, multifaceted pandemic.

So, as my one creative idea in a time of survival, I’m starting a series explaining these concepts I use from network science, nonlinear dynamics, and chaos. I hope these help encourage you to explore more the frameworks that ground you, and give you a better understanding of the amazing work around the world that is fueling the changes we are feeling.

Yes, It's More than a Shirt

amcasari 🦕 — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 01:11:40 +0000

A Quick Guide to More Inclusive Swag

Problem: Assigning binary gender information to a piece of clothing makes it challenging for our team members to find the best fit for themselves. This gendering also scopes the distribution of sizing for items. When members have a hard time finding their size in one gender, they are directed to “the other” gender, which can cause personal distress and feelings of being ‘othered’.

Solution: There is a straight-forward solution. Stop distributing items as “men’s” and “women’s” items.

1/ Describe the item of clothing by cut: “Straight Cut”, “Fitted Cut”, “Tapered Cut” with diagrams showing the difference between the items themselves, not with body styles or images underneath that might suggest gender. Geometric shapes are useful here.

Geometric shapes help people find shirts that are cut to their proportions

2/ Ask all team members who want team swag to submit their preferred clothing size via anonymous survey with more defined information. Use ranges of sizing or measurements, anonymizing the information and retaining the aggregate sizing information.

3/ All sizes matter. If we order for one, we order for all. Only work with companies who will provide small-number batches for certain sizes to ensure that all team members are able to have a cut + size that works for them. (This might mean ordering <5 items in one particular size. The cost of these items is less than the cost of exclusion for one team member.)

Note: I know it’s harder to do this with large third-party events. However, for first-party + team events, it should be within a team’s power + budget to make sure we’re buying + sizing appropriately. The cost of exclusion is higher than the cost of a single item of clothing.

Six Business Reasons You Need a More Diverse Data Science Team

amcasari 🦕 — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 00:13:06 +0000

To quote DJ Patil, the first Chief Data Scientist of the United States, the most successful organizational transformations are anchored in an approach of data science and the application of AI and ML, as a team sport.

Teams looking to expand into this space must include a breadth of roles, skills, and responsibilities, not just one person with a PhD in Computer Science.

What this does for us as a business:

This removes the pressure from any one person to deliver “the AI”.
It invests in employees to learn new skills that will bring value to their career and their team, learning in the best way that works for
them.
It requires teams to work together to develop advanced products that could have impacts at scale that one perspective would miss. If you are a global company, you must have global representation at the table.
It mitigates potential risks by encouraging diversity of thought and problem solving to challenge how “best” to solve a problem.
It immerses all members of a team to understand what kinds of problems AI and ML can solve. This is key for ML and AI adoption in a company and is hardest to teach: how to recognize the kinds of problems these algorithms can solve and how to frame a problem as an AI or ML experiment is the first step in understanding how to build, test and design these systems.
It forces us to question who we are bringing together to solve problems. Does a specific algorithmic change in a deployment lead to a drop in users interacting with a feature? You’ll need someone from the user experience team at the table to help you understand how the constraints you placed on the problem are affecting your desired outcomes.

Robots, now + in the future

amcasari 🦕 — Thu, 30 May 2019 21:45:01 +0000

Q: Robots are the physical manifestation of AI – how will robots transform businesses/ our daily lives in the future?

A: When most people think of robots, what I’ve heard most often comes to mind is something vaguely humanoid or animal-shaped with mobility challenges and usually a sci-fi angle.

When I think of robots, I think of asking my phone “How do I get home?”

If we use this framework with robots as a physical manifestation of AI, it includes the phone you give your grandmother for Christmas. This is what we see now, her using her phone to interact with her bank, ask for directions to the doctor, trading travel pictures with her friends. We are building highly sophisticated technology enabling people to be part of automated decision processes into people’s lives every day.

In the future, and the future is now, we have to continue to make decisions about how and where to integrate technology into our lives.
These algorithms are data-intensive and we have to consider what that means in the applications we build for people. Most promising is the work that I see emphasizing pushing model training and data collection out to devices, to give users the same features they want from advanced products without having to give up your personal local data. There is an area of research known as federated learning which allows developers to give people the benefits that they want from this technology without having to give up their personal patterns. As data protection becomes increasingly important, the architectures for building the applications they want to use will change and platforms will have to adjust to support that.

Three Changes Needed for AI for All

amcasari 🦕 — Thu, 30 May 2019 21:38:35 +0000

What kinds of changes in technology planning and testing should AI leaders be considering?

Design for people. Automated, intelligent systems should be part of a process, but not “the” process. There should never be a point where someone using your technology says “Well, the system says…” There should always be places where human intervention, feedback, and correction is allowed, especially in automated systems where the impact is on humans.
Know now that your data sets are flawed. The original assumption that our data collected at scale was representative enough to apply to all users is flawed. Our technology is not evenly distributed and so our data points do not accurately reflect the population of the world. This results in biased outcomes and must be tested for. Joy Buolamwini’s work testing for the impact of bias in facial recognition software in the Gender Shades project is the perfect example of this. To build more inclusive products for everyone, we must have better data sets that represent everyone.
Truly distribute your teams. The developers we have now will not be able to build the technology that will help the next billion users. Hire people and design teams to enable them to work effectively around the world.

Questions I Ask Event Organizers

amcasari 🦕 — Mon, 20 May 2019 13:26:45 +0000

When you have the privilege to be selective of which community and professional events you attend, it means that you can choose when to say 'No'. You can choose third-party events and speaking opportunities that align with your professional values of fairness and equity in a community space.

Even when I have accepted CFPs, not all of the information I use to make these decisions is available publicly. I created a simple standard response for event organizers to help me understand whether the event aligns with my corporate and personal values. (inspired by Ethan Marcotte's 2014 blog)

Hello [ORGANIZER WHO CONTACTED ME]!

Hooray! This is very exciting.

If you don’t mind, I have a few standard questions I like to send to organizers. Whenever you have a moment:

1/ How do you compensate your speakers?

2/ How does your team build a diverse lineup of speakers?

3/ How do you ensure that you have a wide range of perspectives in your speakers?

4/ What kind of audience would I be speaking to?

5/ What kind of talk would be most relevant?

6/ What would you like your attendees to walk away from after this session?

7/ Do you have a publicly posted Code of Conduct + reporting process?

8/ What accessibility compliance are you designing your event under?

Cheers,
[me]