Industry News

This is a great document outlining the communication principles followed by GitHub Engineering. I’d say this is broadly applicable to teams and organizations—not just Engineering. I love this point about making work visible:

Capturing and exposing processes through URLs also helps make your work more visible. So work in the open and proactively share your work to the widest extent practical. As we continue to grow as an organization, points of collaboration will become even more...

Good points here from Teresa Torres about deadline-driven development, especially the need to take change management slowly:

If your stakeholders are insisting you use date-based roadmaps, I wouldn’t engage in the ideological war about deadlines and predictable work. Instead, start with a feature-based roadmap. Give your stakeholders what they are asking for, and over time, you can introduce opportunities and outcomes.

Some great advice here on what to do when teams stop talking to each other. Starting with why it’s a big problem when that happens:

Teams that don’t talk to each other outside of transactional topics are barely teams at all. High-trust, high-engagement teams outperform, and those teams live and die on their ability to talk to each other. If that’s broken, your team is broken.

I’ve always been adamant that Product and Engineering are in a partnership, not a “healthy tension” relationship. So I very much agree with this post:

The problem is in the assumption that Product and Engineering teams inherently have different goals. They don’t. Both teams are responsible for the growth and stability of the company, for revenue and scalability. Neither can succeed without the other. When we assume otherwise, we sell each side short.

We are seeing high levels of volatility and SEO industry chatter over the weekend, starting late Friday, October 13th, through Saturday and Sunday. I suspect this is from the Google October 2023 core update and maybe some movement from the Google October 2023 spam update, but less from the spam update.

We are now a few days into the two October Google Search updates, the October 2023 spam update and the October 2023 core update and the Google search results are getting heated. The tracking tools are finally all showing large volatility and the chatter has been heated with both of these updates.

I am hearing reports that the Google October 2023 spam update that touched down on October 4, 2023, at around 12:50 p.m. ET is starting to do its job. This means people see fewer spam sites on Google Search results this morning.

Google is now also rolling out the October 2023 core update. This is happening while Google is rolling out the October 2023 spam update and only weeks after Google finished rolling out the August 2023 core update. Also, this is weeks after the September helpful content update.

Google has released a new spam update, the October 2023 spam update. This update goes after cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam. But those sites written in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages should see this more than maybe those in English languages.