The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Engineering management / careers

Mathias Meyer

paperplanes.de

Executive Leadership Coach, Author

Engineering management / careersSoftware / engineering practice

’10’15’20’25
Posts
284 from 16 Apr 2007 to 11 Mar 2025
Posting
now and then
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://www.paperplanes.de/feed.xml

2025 10

  1. Our Book “The Intentional Organization” Is Available for Preorder!
  2. Our Book “The Intentional Organization” Is Available for Preorder!
  3. Three Sources of Conflict And Tension
  4. Three Sources of Conflict And Tension
  5. Making Your Team’s Decisions Better
  6. Making Your Team’s Decisions Better
  7. Navigating the Different Personas of a CTO
  8. Navigating the Different Personas of a CTO
  9. How Can I Change a Culture of Anomymous Feedback?
  10. How Can I Change a Culture of Anomymous Feedback?

2024 2

  1. Six Years of One-on-Ones
  2. Six Years of One-on-Ones

2023 2

  1. Finding Focus in a World Full of Distractions
  2. Finding Focus in a World Full of Distractions

2022 4

  1. Breaking Out of an Endless Cycle of Meetings
  2. Breaking Out of an Endless Cycle of Meetings
  3. When You‘re Stuck, Start By Making a List
  4. When You‘re Stuck, Start By Making a List

2021 2

  1. Introducing: The Intentional Organization
  2. Introducing: The Intentional Organization

2020 2

  1. Dear Founder: Things To Consider When Building a Remote Team
  2. On Drafting an Engineering Strategy

2019 2

  1. The Feedback Log
  2. Why is my team not doing what I expect from them?

2017 1

  1. Workflows That Help Me Stay (and Feel) Productive as a Manager

2015 11

  1. Reading List 2015
  2. The Most Important Thing About 1:1s (and Building Trust)
  3. The Fear of Failure Can Be Paralyzing
  4. To Be a Better Listener, Embrace the Awkward Pause
  5. Five Habits of an Introverted Leader
  6. Taking Care of Business, Taking Care of Yourself
  7. Always Improve, Never Stop, Never Pause, Never Appreciate
  8. Why Hiring for “Culture Fit” Hurts Your Culture
  9. An Alternate Reality for Startups
  10. Why I Don’t Read Email in the Morning
  11. How to do Vacation Right: All It Takes is to Flip a Switch

2014 35

  1. Giving Back: Travis CI’s Charitable Giving in 2014
  2. Reading list 2014
  3. From Open (Unlimited) to Minimum Vacation Policy
  4. Review of my Personal Goals at Travis CI
  5. You Can’t Replicate Culture
  6. How to be Great at Customer Support
  7. The Power of Saying No (To Sugar)
  8. Being Busy, Distractions and Just One More Retweet
  9. Planning Your Week
  10. Only The Simplest Tools
  11. What Adopting Blameless Post-Mortems Has Taught Me About Culture
  12. Fake Everything Until You Make It
  13. Implement Routines to Foster Habits
  14. Focus Starts With Saying No
  15. The Secret to Latte Art
  16. Walking as a Creative Exercise
  17. Is Practical Drift Inevitable?
  18. Git Commit Messages as a Timeline of Reasoning
  19. Three Steps to Finding Your Product’s Price
  20. The Developer is Dead, Long Live the Developer
  21. Start by Building and Selling Small Products
  22. What More Do You Need to Start?
  23. The Joys of New Technology
  24. The New Technology Fallacy
  25. Three Simple yet Incredibly Hard Productivity Tips
  26. Building an Ethical Business
  27. On Assessing Risk in Socio-Technical Systems
  28. On Working (Too) Hard
  29. Building an Infrastructure Service on Top of Infrastructure Services
  30. Why You Should Charge For Your Beta Product
  31. Personal Challenges of Working Remotely
  32. A Standing Desk Love Affair
  33. The Habit of Writing
  34. How Travis CI uses Travis CI to break Travis CI
  35. Small Business Never Gets Boring

2013 13

  1. Reading list 2013
  2. The Smallest Distributed System
  3. Deploying your Jekyll Site to S3 with Travis CI
  4. What is Automation?
  5. Just One More Metric
  6. The Fear of Saying No
  7. Running a Small Business is…
  8. A Short Story on Human Error
  9. Monitoring for Humans
  10. Failure is Always an Option
  11. Coffee and the Art of Customer Happiness
  12. The Virtues of Monitoring, Redux
  13. On Pager Duty

2012 15

  1. A Plea for Client Library Instrumentation
  2. Form Objects with ActiveModel
  3. A Story About Queues in Four Acts
  4. September Reading List
  5. A Culture of Failure
  6. On Resilience in Automated Systems, Failures and the Human Factor
  7. Six-ish Months of eBook Sales: Riak Handbook
  8. June Reading List
  9. Playing with Riak and CRDTs - Counters
  10. Riak Handbook 1.1 is out!
  11. On Notifications, Log Subscribers, and Bringing Sanity to Rails’ Logging
  12. February Reading List
  13. Fun with Ruby Block Parameters
  14. A Tour of Amazon’s DynamoDB
  15. My Publishing Tool Chain

2011 9

  1. Holiday Reading List
  2. Storing User Timelines in Riak
  3. List All of the Riak Keys
  4. The Simple Magic of Consistent Hashing
  5. An Update On The NoSQL Handbook
  6. Web Operations 101 For Developers
  7. EventMachine, How Does It Work?
  8. MongoDB, Data Durability and Improvements coming in 1.8
  9. The Virtues of Monitoring

2010 17

  1. A Simple Redis Use Case for Sorted Sets
  2. Why Riak Search Matters…
  3. Be Humble, and Get Shit Done!
  4. Why I Love and Hate Distributed Systems
  5. An Inconvenient Caveat about MongoDB’s Replica Sets (updated)
  6. 10 Annoying Things About CouchDB
  7. Relational Data, Document Databases and Schema Design
  8. Vim - A Never-ending Love Story
  9. Presentation Fu
  10. June - A Month of Conferences
  11. Upcoming Conference Talks
  12. Conference Talks You Should Be Watching
  13. ActiveRecord’s Callbacks Ruined My Life
  14. Notes on MongoDB
  15. A Collection Of Redis Use Cases
  16. NoSQL And You - Thoughts On Finding Right Partner In Chrime
  17. Redis and Rails sitting on the Couch

2009 36

  1. Making TextMate And rvm Play Nice
  2. How To Redis
  3. When To Redis
  4. There’s Something About Redis
  5. The Shoulda RSpec Extravaganza
  6. How Not To Design An API
  7. The NoSQL Dilemma (with a Happy Ending)
  8. There’s Something About Legacy Code
  9. Daily AWS Wtf and German Rails Conference
  10. Ruby 1.9 Tidbits
  11. Smalltalk on RabbitMQ and Nanite
  12. Crumble - Breadcrumbs for Rails Applications
  13. RailsWayCon Slides
  14. RailsWayCon in Berlin
  15. A Ruby Meta-Programming Riddle
  16. Ruby 1.9 Upgrading Woes
  17. Remembering super
  18. The Curious Case Of The Bang Method
  19. run_later Gets Some Rails 2.3 Middleware Love
  20. XRay Goggles For Your Ruby Processes
  21. Parallelizing Capistrano
  22. Mocking Is So 2008
  23. Keep It Simple
  24. When Overusing self Turns Into self.pity
  25. Hello From Jekyll
  26. Cocoa Lessons Learned #1: Threading is Hard
  27. RailsWayCon: Call For Papers
  28. ObjectiveResource: It’s Like ActiveResource For Cocoa
  29. Integrity And Passenger Play Nice
  30. New Tools For My Toolbox
  31. Announcing Macistrano: A Desktop-Client for Webistrano
  32. Running Webistrano Tasks Using Capistrano
  33. ScreencastWeek at Upstream Berlin
  34. Raising Test-Awareness
  35. Things to Do in 2009
  36. Things Learned in 2008: TATFT

2008 58

  1. JetBrains Releases RubyMine
  2. I wrote about going back to Vim as my daily text editor
  3. Why Legacy Code Matters
  4. Why Code Metrics Don’t Matter
  5. Merb’s run_later Coming to a Thread-safe Rails Near You
  6. Testing Meme
  7. Undefining Class Methods in Ruby
  8. Why Coding Guidelines Don’t Matter
  9. Migrating a Project to use Rails UTC-based Migrations
  10. Git Bits: Renaming with Lowercase and Uppercase
  11. Spring’s New Maintenance Policy
  12. “i”.can.has?(“cheezeburger”)
  13. Why Refactoring Matters
  14. Django turns 1.0
  15. Why Testing Matters
  16. RailsConf Europe 2008 Recap
  17. Ruby and Rails Book Updates
  18. Git Community Book
  19. Adam Keys Hearts Complexity
  20. Megazoomer Full-Screens your Mac Applications
  21. Missing iPhone Applications
  22. Chris Wanstrath on Side Projects
  23. Amazon Elastic Block Storage
  24. Merlin Mann on the recent Gmail Outage
  25. Stop Using FTP
  26. Rails 2.2 To Be Thread-Safe
  27. The iPhone AppStore
  28. Shameless RailsConf Self-Plug
  29. A Busy Month
  30. Bratwurst On Rails 2008
  31. For The Love Of Light: The Book
  32. Smalltalk on Git
  33. Stalled MySQL Logins
  34. A Small Gem For Web Development on Mac OS X
  35. Git Bits: Things you should know about git svn dcommit
  36. Rails 2.0: It’s Done
  37. MySQL No-Nos: ORDER BY RAND()
  38. Every Day Polaroid
  39. Git Bits: Committing Partial File Changes
  40. TextMate + RubyAMP = Unconditional Love
  41. Friday Tab Sweep (21.03.2008)
  42. For The Love of Light
  43. Review: The Ruby Programming Language
  44. Review: Working Effectively With Legacy Code
  45. Friday Tab Sweep (22.02.08)
  46. Ruby Tidbits: How Private is Private?
  47. Seriously the Most Awesome Photoshop Tutorials Ever
  48. How to Process Multiple ActiveMessaging Queues Concurrently
  49. Amazon S3 is Down
  50. Serializing Data with ActiveMessaging and Filters
  51. Paul Tuckfield on Scaling MySQL
  52. The End of an Era
  53. Friday Tab Sweep (08.02.2008)
  54. acts_as_solr is Dead, Long Live acts_as_solr
  55. Friday Tab Sweep (01.02.2008)
  56. Refactoring Rails Controllers
  57. Friday Tab Sweep (18.01.08)
  58. Reading List

2007 65

  1. Review: “Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risks”
  2. CruiseControl in your Menu Bar
  3. Rails/Ruby Books Galore
  4. Friday Links (14.12.07)
  5. Mocha and RSpec Don’t Play Nice
  6. CruiseControl.rb and RSpec Play Nice
  7. Dave Thomas on MetaProgramming in Ruby
  8. Friday Links (07.12.07)
  9. A Weird Ruby Bug
  10. Testing Active Web Service with RSpec
  11. MacSanta is Coming to Town
  12. Friday Links (30.11.07)
  13. Singing the Paypal Subscription Blues
  14. Abandon Ship!
  15. RESTful Leopard Spell-Check
  16. “Advancing with Rails” Training with David Black
  17. An Article on Ferret
  18. Do Java’s Date Classes Make Any Sense?
  19. Using Rails-like Environments with Spring
  20. The Perils of Using final
  21. RailsConf Europe 2007 Day Two
  22. Best Practices on Rails
  23. RailsConf Europe 2007 Day One
  24. Bratwurst On Rails
  25. Friday Rails Links
  26. Bugs are Magic Tricks
  27. Compiler and Typing Directives for Ruby?
  28. Write Tests for even the Smallest Projects
  29. Why an IDE for Rails?
  30. MarsEdit 2.0 loves Flickr
  31. Friday Rails Links
  32. ActiveRecord and a custom method_missing
  33. RailsConf Europe is a sell-out
  34. Film is the new Black
  35. IDEA still makes Java Fun
  36. Increase Productivity by Reducing Distractions
  37. Friday Rails Links
  38. Inbox Zero
  39. Webistrano Released
  40. Storing Images with Oracle and Hibernate
  41. Random Rails Links
  42. Continuous Integration for Ruby and Rails
  43. Smalltalk on AP4R
  44. Random Friday Links
  45. 10 Things I’ve been Doing Lately
  46. Learning Ten Finger Typing
  47. Catching Up
  48. The Freelancer Survey on FreelanceSwitch
  49. A First Look at OmniFocus
  50. When Will the Web 2.0 Bubble Burst?
  51. Bootstrapping a Web Project with Java and Rails
  52. Announcing Bratwurst On Rails
  53. JRuby 1.0 is out
  54. Smalltalk about BackgrounDRb
  55. Deploying in a chroot Environment with Capistrano
  56. RubyFX Script Announced
  57. Namespacing Your Rails Model - An Afterthought
  58. Microsoft announces IronRuby
  59. Namespace Your Rails Model
  60. The Web Design Survey
  61. CSSEdit Keeps Getting Better And Better
  62. A Fix for Rails 1.2
  63. Multi-Database Connectivity in Rails
  64. Supermarket 2.0
  65. Welcome Aboard