liz

I met and lost three incredible people in 2023. I wasn’t extremely close with them, and still they impacted me greatly in the brief time I knew each of them. And even after they died, I continued to see how much they inspired others, and be more inspired by them myself. When it [...]

I'm about to tell you about what has become an unexpected game-changer in my life: an orange pen. To say I was resistant to the suggestion is quite an understatement. It wasn't the color of the pen that put me off, it was its part in an exercise I was asked to do. [...]

Because of my own personal reaction (usually shock and worry) every time I see a female engineering leader go through a reduction in scope, a non-promotion-releated role change, or an outright departure, and because of my own desire to make it easier to support each other with changes and growth, I shared this [...]

The real story here is spending time with the revered and adored Ms. Avery - my youngest son's third-grade teacher several years ago, who made a career change into software engineering a few years ago. She and Chris contacted me about speaking about my experiences in the industry and currently at GitHub, and [...]

I remember my first office job. I don't remember my boss's name anymore, but I remember his face distinctly. I remember his loud, booming voice, especially when he was upset about something, which wasn't infrequent. I remember him slamming his office door which was across and diagonal from my cubicle, and then immediately [...]

I love when I get to talk about my work, and recording this episode was such a great time. Check out Pausing Feature Development to Focus on Tech Debt and DX, and hear more about how GitHub made time to focus on engineering fundamentals.

Check out this LeadDev module, 5 investments for a sustainable, high-performing team, going live next week, 20 Sep 2022. Meet short term hiring goals or invest in building a sustainable, high-performing team? These are the questions that plague every hiring manager’s mind. Learn how to build a healthy, self-sustaining ecosystem within your team that [...]

Before coding anything, make sure you've involved a decision maker, the person doing the work, someone with context, someone with fresh perspective, and whoever is going to be maintaining it. These are the five essential roles for planning a technical project. One person can cover all of these things with one exception: you [...]

When it comes to negotiating, there's an easy and instant way, where you just go for it and see what happens. In another sense, really, the easiest thing to do is nothing, and rely solely on outside forces and chance.   Or, you can take additional steps that will increase the likelihood of [...]

I'm often working with executives to come up with timelines and priorities, and I'm often working with older children to help them understand what I need to know in order to help them make a decision or complete something, and--I promise I'm not making a correlation between executives and children here--through this [...]