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As you increase your seniority, part of your impact and performance often includes mentoring and developing others. Or perhaps you see a need to help develop your team, so you’ll find opportunities and needs to mentor other software developers.

Many of us have tried setting goals in the past. Perhaps it was a required exercise for school or work, or we wanted to see if it could help us accomplish something. Results were mixed, and we often left goals unfinished.

Across most industries this year, leaders in all functions are working through difficult prioritization and budget justification exercises. Spending that was previously approved with minimal scrutiny is now being put under the microscope by finance and procurement teams. Software engineering organizations aren’t exempt from these intense audits, but development teams still have products to ship and expectations to meet. Now they’re attempting to pull it off with more limited resources.

Software engineering org charts have never been more complex. Gone are the days of large, stable teams that report to a single leader and work in highly structured ways on long-term projects.

Open source developer portal project Backstage hasn’t been on the scene for long. But in that time it has gained popularity quickly. The rate at which it’s added stars on GitHub is telling.

Our business is growing. Fiscal Q1 is almost wrapped, and it’s been a doozy: after closing our Series A our revenue is growing quickly, and we’ve been able to bring on a ton of new awesome customers–like OpenTable, BigPanda, Fastly, Adobe, and more.

Kicking off a Kubernetes migration? Moving from cron jobs to a data orchestratror? Locking down your software supply chain? Or maybe all three? Whether paying down technical debt, upgrading a library version, or staying on top of security and compliance, engineering managers and directors have a lot to coordinate:

As a leader, onboarding with a new company is hard. The stakes are high–you and your new employer have invested a lot of time and energy into choosing each other–and the objective is complex–quickly go from an unknown outsider to a trusted leader. Oh, and make a positive impact on your team’s trajectory or output while you’re at it.

Downtime sucks (duh) - it means unhappy end users and engineers. Failures and error messages frustrate customers and interrupt engineers (or worse, wake them up).