One of the biggest traps for any team is confusing progress with movement. It's easy to stay busy, harder to stay focused. As managers, part of our role is to help our teams create value fast enough to learn, but not so fast that we lose direction. This is where the concept of the MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, becomes a practical tool for alignment and learning.
As engineering managers, one of the most powerful tools we have for guiding teams is the OKR framework. OKRs help translate big ambitions into clear, measurable work. They connect high-level objectives with concrete key results so teams know both what they are aiming for and how progress will be measured. They provide clarity, alignment, and a sense of purpose.
PHP 8.5 lands with a pack of features that smooth out daily development, remove long-standing friction points, and make functional patterns far easier to write. It feels like a release focused on practical wins: cleaner code, stronger introspection tools, safer configuration defaults, and more helpful debugging. Let's walk through the most interesting additions.
Every engineering manager starts with the same instinct: to solve problems. It is what made you good as an engineer, and what first earned you trust as a leader. But as your scope grows, the definition of what it means to solve problems must change. Your role is no longer to fix issues directly, but to ensure the team can fix them without you.
Soil moisture modules are a simple and friendly way to check how wet your soil is using a pair of probes and a small control board. They offer two outputs you can use with Arduino: an analog signal that changes depending on how wet the soil is, and a digital signal that flips on or off when the moisture crosses a level you set with the onboard potentiometer. The whole setup is compact, cheap and very popular for plant care projects, garden automation and basic hobby experiments.
