Grafana Labs is a remote-first company. We hire and work with people from all over the world. The team I am in is a 10 person team is distributed across 5 countries (you can read more about our team here. Sometimes we leverage benefits of synchronous communication and collaboration, however as an all-remote company, most of the work happens asynchronously. Recently we started experimenting with synchronous collaborative programming and I was putting together a guide for our team to use as a reference and I thought of turning it into a blog post.

I was going over the books that I managed to read in 2021 and realized that this year was a bit special compared to my experience in the past years. This year, I was very quick to put away books that I picked up but did not enjoy reading, or did not find valuable for the given point of time. This gave me a chance to reflect a bit on my past readings and I thought to compile a short list of all time favorites.

Manager READMEs are a good way to introduce yourself as an Engineering Manager (EM). When I transitioned into Engineering Management, I created one for me and just writing things down helped a lot to reflect on my career and learn more about myself.

EM responsibilities vary between companies, or even might be different between teams within a company, so my README is always changing. I do my best to reflect and update it at least every month. While the change is always in progress, there are few things which change very rarely, particularly my values and beliefs, and this is the part I thought to share in this post.

A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who regularly get together on a voluntary basis to collectively learn and share knowledge about a domain of interest. Throughout my life I’ve built and seen many CoPs running successfully. If I look back, probably the first CoP I was involved in was a forum where we discussed and lived rock music.

A histogram is an approximate representation of the distribution of numerical data. In other words, histograms show the number of data points that fall within a specified range of values (typically called “bins” or “buckets”). In this post, I’m exploring options for querying data as histogram by using SQL.