lethain / staff-eng

Collection of stories of how folks have reached Staff-plus roles in technology.

Hi folks! I'm the author of The Engineering Executive's Primer (2024), Staff Engineer (2021), and An Elegant Puzzle (2019). Catch up on my most recent writing on my blog!

Some of my writing that's been popular:

• Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt
• Writing an Engineering strategy
• Productivity in the age of hypergrowth
• Staff Engineer archetypes
• Work on what matters

You can also find me on Mastodon, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

staff-eng's Issues

Errata for back cover and other material not currently found in this repository?

I purchased the physical book and was reading the back cover material and found a typo that caused me to pause and re-read the sentence a few times. In the 4th paragraph, fifth sentence (but third line as it's printed), we see (emphasis on the typo is mine):

Will you enjoy being a Staff Engineer or you will toil for years to achieve a role that doesn't suit you?

So the proposition is that I'll enjoy being a Staff Engineer, or else I'll toil for years? 😉 I think "...you will..." should be "...will you...".

EDIT: Looks like that sentence can be found here and here and they're both fixed.

Is there a place where I can find the materials on the cover, in the front matter, references, and other locations that aren't in this repository?

Visual cue for visited links

I'm currently reading the articles on the Guides page of the website, and I noticed that there is no styling difference for the visited links. I think it's important to add it (especially for this kind of indexing pages) so it's easier for the reader to get a quick visual feedback about what they are done with and what's remaining.

Errant double quotes in "Overview - But will you still write software?"

On page 25 of the printed book, in the Overview, under the "But will you still write software?" section, within the Ras Kasa Williams quote there's a double quote pointing the wrong way, with no spaces between it and the preceding or following word. This error is not seen in the current markdown. Also note that the commit that introduced this line was correct, so it appears that the error isn't in the content found in this repo.

improve legibility of body font

Hi @lethain 👋🏼

Thanks for compiling this resource! I just started digging into the site today and have already found some insightful bits.

I've noticed that my eyes are getting a little squinty looking at the page, both on my laptop (macOS) and my phone (Android).

One potentially quick way to improve this would be to bump the font-weight from 300 to 400, but it might also be worth exploring using other fonts for the site's body content.

If you're interested in exploring this change, I'd be happy to open a PR to help on it.

---

Current (300)

Possible (400?)

/rss should return application/xml instead of applicaiton/octet-stream

• © Will Larson in the footer points to https://staffeng.com/https://lethain.com
• RSS link at the footer points to https://staffeng.com/rss which downloads a file and not render XML which I expected. Although if I visit https://staffeng.com/rss.xml , I am able to see the XML feed.

Misattribution in the "Staff projects" guide.

In the "Staff project required" section of the "Staff projects" guide, the quote attributed to Ritu Vincent's story:

I definitely had a Staff Project… Important note: The promotion didn’t come until I had also served some meaningful time as tech lead and delivered a lot of value there. But this project was definitely the firestarter.

is from Ras Kasa Willams' story.

General Styling Improvements

Seeing #59 and noticing a lack of dark mode support, I thought I'd offer to do a pass over the styles to make these and a few other improvements in a batch.

• Address #59 and make some other legibility tweaks
• Refactor and modernize the CSS to reduce the page weight (not that it's huge) and make future changes easier
• Add a dark color scheme and support for system dark mode (and/or provide a manual toggle)
• Make the main content and book page more visually consistent

Let me know how this all sounds, if there's any guidance or patterns i should follow, and if there's anything else that could be done.