Jared Cohen

The prerequisites for being a great manager are:

• Sincerely and deeply caring about your team and company.

• Having empathy, self-awareness, organizational awareness, perspective, maturity, and security.

If you possess those characteristics, you can become a great manager in practice by doing the following:

1. Empower your team.

   Your job is to set high expectations, invite questions, be available, and trust your team enough to let go. Your team’s job is to own their tasks, update you, and ask questions. Don’t micromanage. Get involved the minimum amount possible.

2. Serve your team.

   Your job as a manager is to serve your team, not the other way. Put your team before yourself and you, your team, and your company will all be better off. Give credit and take blame. Stand up for them. Highlight them, their skills, and their success. You can’t succeed if they don’t.

3. Seek and provide open, honest, and frequent communication of all kinds.

   Celebrate, discuss, and learn from successes and failures. Encourage debate. Ask for ideas. Seek and provide immediate and frequent feedback.

4. Develop strong relationships.

   Your relationships with your team set the foundation for everything else. Strong relationships make you and your team happier, communicate better, and more successful. Take time to get personal. Once a month at your team meeting, talk about your life outside of work. Get together outside the office. Get to know the other people in their lives.

5. Understand strengths, weaknesses, and motivations.

   Keep notes on everyone. This isn’t a list you update and glance at once a year. This is something you think about every week, in the context of every meeting and every assignment. This guides how you apply these practices to each person.

6. Focus on career development.

   Align your team’s career goals with day-to-day tasks when possible. Push them to think about and accomplish their goals. Help them develop the skills they’ll need.

7. Be available.

   Do one-on-ones with each person. Don’t block someone’s progress on a task. Pitch in when it makes sense. When a big project is taking long hours, be there and help out.

8. Be positive, enthusiastic, and energetic.

   Your attitude permeates the team. If you have the right attitude, so will they. Your attitude will be in the background on everything your team does. It will make good times even better and bad times easier to push through.

9. Explain the contribution to the whole.

   Your team wants to be part of something bigger than themselves. Talk about how team responsibilities and tasks are consistent with and contribute to the company and mission.

10. Tailor your management.

    Every person and situation is different. Be flexible, not dogmatic. These are good practices to start with, but learn, adapt, and apply these as you see fit.

If you’re going to dedicate yourself to being a great manager, do more than read about it. Take the best ideas from every source. Make a checklist of the things you need to do. And check them off repeatedly. Your team will notice.

If you don’t use Instapaper or some similar tool, I don’t know how you survive. Instapaper is a great way “to save web pages for reading later.”

To summarize, you simply click the bookmarklet and the webpage appears in your reading list.

One feature that I wish Instapaper had is the ability to add a note through the bookmarklet. Often, I Instapaper something that someone sent to me. When I read it later, I want to remember who sent it, so I can respond to them. You can always go to your Instapaper account and edit the title. And, maybe that’s the easiest way. But, one other quick and simple way to do it is:

• Go to the webpage you want to read later.
• Right click anywhere on the page to open the menu.
• Select “Inspect Element”.
• In the window that opens at the bottom of the screen, be sure you’re in the “Element” tab.
• In the html, click the gray arrow next to the “html” tag to expand it (if the arrow is pointed down, it’s already expanded), then do the same for the “head” tag.
• Within the “head” tag is a “title tag”, double click on the text between the opening and closing “title” tags and edit that to be whatever you want the title to be in Instapaper.
• Then click Instapaper’s “Read Later” bookmarklet.

Nothing too exciting here. You’re just changing the html that the bookmarklet grabs and saves. The bookmarklet grabs the text in the “title” tag to use as the title in Instapaper.

These instructions are for Chrome, but most browsers can do something similar.

In the last couple of weeks, I started using PeepCode. So far, the classes have been great.

First, I did Meet the Command Line and Advanced Command Line. These did a really good job teaching the basics of how your computer works at the file level (if that’s the right way to explain it), including:

• directory structure
• meaning of files and directories
• commands to use to interact with your computer below the graphical interface
• lots of basics on how files work, permissions, ssh, shell functions…

Those two classes are great additions to the syllabus for how to teach yourself the basics of computer science and web development.

I also watched parts of:

• Capistrano 2
• Meet Sinatra
• Play by Play: Francis Hwang
• Play by Play: Yehuda Katz

All four of those look awesome and I’ll be doing them soon.

disclaimin

I used four migrations to create and change a model in Rails. The first migration created it. The next three migrations changed fields as I learned exactly how I wanted the model to work.

A friend saw my code and told me that when possible I should combine migrations. Migrations become hard to manage and track, especially with multiple developers. Combining would keep the code neater and easier to understand and maintain.

I had already migrated my local and production databases, so I had to rollback, fix the code, and migrate again.

Locally, it was easy. I ran:

rake db:migrate VERSION=date_of_migration_to_rollback_to

If you need some background on migrations, check out this Rails Guide. It explains:

Migrations are stored as files in the db/migrate directory, one for each migration class. The name of the file is of the form YYYYMMDDHHMMSS_create_products.rb, that is to say a UTC timestamp identifying the migration followed by an underscore followed by the name of the migration.

Here, the date_of_migration_to_rollback_to was the timestamp in the migration preceding the one that created model.

I then updated the code, combining the four migrations into one. I migrated the database. And it all worked locally.

On production it was a bit different. I had to SSH into the server as the deploy user. I navigated to the releases directory. Those releases are named only with a timestamp. I had to open each one until I found where to rollback to. Then, I ran

cap deploy:rollback

several times until I was in the correct place. As far as I could tell, no one command on production let me directly target the release I wanted to rollback to. Each time I ran the rollback command, I rolled back one release. After running it a few times, I was in the right place.

I then pushed the code to master, deployed, and it all worked.

Two and a half years ago, I started doing every computer science and web development tutorial I could find. If I were starting again today, knowing what I now know, I’d do it something like this.

Start with the basics of computer science and programming.

• Introduction to Computer Science I, David Malan, Harvard Extension School
• Understanding Computers and the Internet, David Malan, Harvard Extension School
• Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, John Guttag, MIT
• Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science I, various instructors, MIT
• Introduction to Computer Science (CS101), Building a Search Engine, David Evans, Udacity

Understand the fundamental interaction between your computer and the internet.

• Building Dynamic Websites, David Malan, Harvard Extension School
• cURL project
• Charles or Live HTTP Headers

Run through HTML and CSS tutorials with quackit and w3schools. Play with more advanced front-end development at CSS-TRICKS and TheCodePlayer.

Learn about databases and how to search them with SQL.

• Introduction to Databases, Jennifer Widom, Stanford
• SQLZOO

Start on Ruby with RubyLearning’s Core Ruby Programming and move on to their Programming for the Web with Ruby course.

Learn the basics of Rails with RailsGuides. And, then get deeper with Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails, Michael Hartl. Watch Railscasts for detailed lessons on implementing Rails.

Add Javascript and jQuery.

• JavaScript: The Good Parts, Douglas Crockford
• Eloquent JavaScript, A Modern Introduction to Programming, Marijn Haverbeke
• jQuery tutorials

And some other fun stuff.

• Rubular for playing with regular expressions
• Linux Command Shell
• Unix Power Tools
• Google tutorials

That’s the plan. I wouldn’t stick to it strictly. That’s what makes it so much more fun to learn with less stucture. I’d bounce around as I find things I’m interested in. I’d fast forward through the less interesting parts. And, I’d build stuff whenever I could. While I’m doing all this, I’d be reading Hacker News, searching Google and stackoverflow for answers to questions that arise, and checking the documentation of whatever I’m learning.

These are some of the tutorials and resources I’ve found most useful. The options are growing fast with resources such as Udacity and Coursera. If you have other good ones, please tell me.

I hope this is helpful for someone.

disclaimin

I’m not a web developer, I just pretend to be one in my spare time, so please forgive (and point out) mistakes.

I had been reading a lot about the benefits of using PostgreSQL over MySQL. I found this Railscast, which like all Railscasts, is fantastic. But, when trying to install PostgreSQL with Homebrew, I kept getting errors, including:

curl: (7) couldn’t connect to host Error: Failure while executing: curl -f#LA ‘Homebrew 0.7.1 (Ruby 1.8.7-174; Mac OS X 10.7.3)’

I Googled and found that my Homebrew might be out of date, so I tried the proposed solution:

brew update

But, that gave me more errors even after I played around with it:

error: Untracked working tree file ‘.gitignore’ would be overwritten by merge.

and

error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:

More Goolging and I finally confirmed that my Homebrew was out of date, and because of that, ironically, brew update wouldn’t work.

I went into my /usr/local directory:

cd /usr/local

and updated Homebrew with git:

git fetch https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew.git

git reset −−hard FETCH_HEAD

That worked.

I then had to update Xcode to 4.3. And the install command worked:

brew install postgresql

“A really important point for me is that I don’t use any brand or corporate sponsors. So I have no responsibility to anyone but myself and the subjects. And that is for me one of the more important things in the work. I think, today, as important as the result is the way you do things.”
- JR

Free the art. Free the mind.

Beautiful and inspiring Ted Talk by Artist JR on his work “showing the world its true face.”

Dear President Obama,

I voted for you the first time because you said so many of the right things, and I believed you. You fooled me. The last few years are not what I had hoped for in many ways. The leadership potential I saw during your campaign went missing when you took office.

In the State of the Union tonight, you said all the right things again and reminded me why I voted for you the first time. You might have fooled me again.

Your list of priorities to secure our future is the same as my list, and in many ways, the same list that made us great in the past:

• Funding and reforming education
• Funding scientific research
• Funding infrastructure
• Drawing and keeping job-creating immigrants

Some of your other top points are also mine:

• Congress needs to grow up
• Fair tax system
• No bailouts

You even (briefly) talked about the need to make difficult spending cuts in social security, medicare, and medicaid. (I could have used a few more cuts and a bit more on the difficult decisions.)

You said so many of the right things, President Obama. Just like last time. I believe you, President Obama. Just like last time.

This time, in addition to saying all the right things, please also lead us toward them. Whatever it takes.