Being a manager isn’t a job that starts with a sacred oath but it’s a shame that it doesn’t, because you do hold a responsibility for the people that you manage. The gravity of the position is something you should embrace. Your actions can and will have impacts on others. I’ve noticed a few easy to avoid mistakes that I believe those of us in management can avoid and make work life better for those that we serve.

It seems that every week there’s a security breach that resolves around the fact that secrets were stored poorly. As a responsible and security conscious engineer, you likely want to avoid the professional and reputational hazard associated with a sloppy security posture. You’ve likely heard of HashiCorp and you might have heard of their secrets management solution, Vault. Why? Secrets storage invariably costs companies anytime it is done incorrectly. It’s not a matter of “if” but “when”.

Being a new manager is hard. It’s rare to find a company that will train you and support you outside of tossing you in the deep end with a brief “You now have direct reports, good luck!“. I’ve been fortunate enough to find a place that encourages growth, socializes concepts and materials that go a lot further than the above. Within that I’ve found some extremely useful resources to help stay on the path.

Fixing an issue with GPGMail on OSX

Today I wanted to attach to the Node debugger for some interactive debugging. Normally, I would sprinkle in a few console.log statements but today’s issue had me wanting to find out where a error was being thrown from within an external library, mongoose if you’re wondering.