Jon Bock - Development Tech Blog

Why are 1:1 meetings important?

One to one meetings are an essential part of management for all companies large or small, they provide a way for managers to connect with their reports. Its always a good idea to prioritize one to ones in our calendars and ensure that there is a regular space that can be allocated for the private conversations.

Together with each member of your team, reserve thirty to sixty minutes once a week or twice a week to talk about the timetable. This will help you stay on track. Do not allow yourself to feel hemmed in by the confines of a conference room; instead, propose taking a break from the office to go for a stroll or grab a cup of coffee.

While some managers like to schedule their one-on-one meetings on a specific day of the week, others prefer to spread out their meetings throughout the week so that they may maintain the highest possible mental presence. One advantage of scheduling meetings on the same day as one another is that it makes it easier to identify connections between the various activities being carried out by your team. Determine whatever method is most effective for you, then construct your timetable so that it returns the most information to your reports.

The one-on-one meeting is the most effective method for managers and the people who report to them to connect on important matters, build a solid connection, and guarantee that employees feel as though they are working toward their goals, both in the workplace and in other aspects of their lives.

However, if you do not have an appropriate framework, agenda, and mindset for the 1:1 encounter, it is possible that it will become just another meeting in your day. Here is our strategic strategy for making the one-on-one meeting the most important meeting you attend, whether you are a manager or an individual contributor.

In 1:1 meetings a manager sits down with an employee for the purpose of having a dialogue that can go in any direction and is planned in advance. The one-on-one meeting, as opposed to the status report or the tactical meeting, is an opportunity for coaching, mentoring, providing perspective, or even just venting. The one-on-one meeting goes beyond merely having an open door policy and instead sets aside time on a consistent cadence for leaders and their teams to engage with one another and communicate.

There isn't just one approach to set up a one-on-one meeting. The emotional requirements of people you manage, the nature of your relationship with the team member, and the degree of experience they have all play a role in determining the most effective method to plan your meetings so that they are productive.

The creation of an environment in which individuals may talk freely about the topics and worries that are on their minds is the most essential component of a productive one-on-one meeting. The employee is the primary focus of these discussions, and their presence is absolutely necessary.

Managers approach to 1:1

Each manager will have their own approach and ability to add their own personality and style to their one to ones. Start your one-on-one meeting with an open-ended question. This lets the most important and important-to-me topics rise to the top. Here are some questions you might try:

How are you feeling? (Open ended to see how the report is feeling, as well as to look for hidden signs in their tone and words; there may be hidden signals to their mental state as well, which may necessitate additional questions and care.)

What did you learn last week / since we last talked? (Another open-ended question that will look for good and bad things they have learned; this may also provide insight into good and bad things they have learned.)

What are you most looking forward to?

What do you worry about the most?

Reports approach to 1:1

Take each meeting with your line manager seriously; this is your dedicated space where you can address concerns and learn about new information. Make notes during the week to remind yourself of topics to discuss and to ensure that your meeting runs smoothly. This is also a place to provide feedback/brag notes, letting your line manager know about the good things you've done so they're visible and not forgotten. If, like me, you are not involved in the day-to-day grunt work with the team, this is an excellent opportunity to let the management know about the excellent work you have been doing.

Another important aspect of this is managing up, where feedback and improvements can be fed back to management to improve processes and highlight any issues that can be identified early.

With all the interesting improvements that the team at Microsoft are undertaking relating to performance improvements, I would like to highlight a new preview release that they have provided for new performance enhancements.

Here is just a overview summary of what they have talked about, you can read more in their main article below.

Compilation with .Net Framework

• Historically compilation performed with tradeoffs, with combination of PreJitting to optimize code for steady state performance, but is slow and will affect initial start time.
• Alternative method like an econoJit approach that will start fast but code quality will suffer.
• .Net provides a combination in order to take a balanced approach that will provide a reasonable job for both start up and steady state peformance.

Tiered performance allows .Net to have multiple compilations so that they can be hot swapped, so we can pick best technique for startup and best for steady state performance.

the benefits of this are:-

• Faster application startup time
  • Tiered compilation ask JIT to compile quickly and optimise if needed.
• Faster steady state performance
  • Tiered compilation ask JIT to create optimised code in background thread that will replace the pre compiled version.

To try this:-

• If you build the application yourself using .NET 2.1 SDK – Add the MSBuild property <TieredCompilation>true</TieredCompilation>to the default property group in your project file. For example:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
    <PropertyGroup>
      <OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
      <TargetFramework>netcoreapp2.1</TargetFramework>
      <TieredCompilation>true</TieredCompilation>
    </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

• If you run an application that has already been built, edit runtimeconfig.json to add System.Runtime.TieredCompilation=true to the configProperties. For example:

  {
      "runtimeOptions": {
        "configProperties": {
          "System.Runtime.TieredCompilation": true
        }
      },
      "framework": {
        ...
      }
    }

• If you run an application and don’t want to modify any files, set the environment variable

COMPlus_TieredCompilation=1

Reference: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/08/02/tiered-compilation-preview-in-net-core-2-1/

With the ever evolving algorithmic dynamics of google, and how it tries to interpret and classify websites available on the web, there has in recent years seen a shift in the overall tactics once deployed by search engine optimization specialists.

The once common tactics seen on the web such as aggressively building up landing pages and key word stuffing pages in order to attempt to boost rankings are now seen as outdated. More evident with googles recent penguin release such tactics has seen to cause many once establish high ranking sites to loose rankings on various keywords and suffer the search engine penalties associated with them.

Other tactics that have fallen fowl of the search engines are things like participating in large link building campaigns, whereby paid or otherwise links are aggressively sought after in order to build large amounts of them, either by buying placements from other websites or by spamming digital link directories.
The aim now is to not use such disparate link building campaigns and to shift towards building fewer but more quality links that are relevant and possess more suitable and diverse anchor tags.

The obsession with that number 1 spot
With previous understanding of user driven behavior and the ability to acquire new users to your website, there was always the obsession with obtaining the number 1 spot. It is however still relevant to aim as high as possible and at the least to remain on the first page of any given search term. However the understanding of users behavior and how people interact with search results has changed alot. With most search engines and especially with those of google, the companies revenue is based upon the amount of ads its able to sell, and as such there has been a greater prevalence in the ads seen at the top of search results. This has also resulted in a shift in users behavior as they are more aware of the prevalence of advertisements located at the top of search results, thus have adapted their behavior in the understanding that they may have to scroll further down the result set in order to locate the results that are of more relevance to them.

The main tactic in order to capture an increase in the click through rate is the better utilization of the web pages title and descriptions that will be displayed in the search result. It has been shown that these have a greater impact as to whether links are clicked and selected if they are tailored to each relevant page with meaningful descriptions and titles.
Creating a wide range of landing pages and keywords what are well targeted to long tail searches prove a good move in order to capture ranks for more defined niche search traffic. The focus on these better quality content pages with deep dives into topics help to bring in the various small percentile of keywords, but accumulatively provide a greater range of search results. Gone are the days of creating lots of landing pages with thin content in them as google especially are now removing these pages and penalizing sites that perform this kind of tactic.

Any change that is being made to a website require long term planning and commitment as improvements generally take a long time period to acquire any improvements in search rankings. The usual timescale for any such improvements would be on a timescale of 2 to 6 months, but this may be accelerating depending on your sites value and the terms being sought after.