When advancing in an engineering career, at some point, the question will come up of if you’re interested in the technical track or the management track. Different people thrive on different tracks and many people move back and forth between the two, some of them multiple times. While at many companies, good engineers are promoted to become engineering managers, the jobs are actually very different, and it’s worth considering what you’re getting yourself into and if it’s a position in which you can thrive. As I made the transition into management and ultimately back, I learned some things about myself and how I operate.

“We call managers who have low, almost non-existent involvement in their team’s work absentee managers. Those with extremely (maybe excruciatingly) close involvement are micromanagers. And in between those are the thought partners, the ones who empower, enable and encourage their teams to do the best work of their lives. How can you determine where you fall on this spectrum so you can learn how to move in the right direction instead of being a micromanager or an absentee manager?

Looking globally at the resiliency aspect of an architecture creates different opportunities, like providing a different user experience, scaling and supporting heavier loads, and generally, building a more robust system.

If your company is slow to embrace open source, take heart from Microsoft's Python experience.

If you haven't heard of Lua, it's a really small programming language. Maybe you have heard of it, but never had a reason to learn it because your programming language of choice does everything you need it to. Well, here are a few reasons you should learn Lua anyway.