Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

The Power of Empathy
3 minutes read.

"I don't know even what to say right now, I'm just glad you told me. Because rarely a response makes something better, what makes something better is connection." - I'd share this short video with anyone who's in a leadership position, may it be by title or by acting as a leader inside of the organization. Empathy, I believe, is an undervalued skill by many technical managers. Even the slightest improvement can do wonders to the way you lead others.

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Always Make Sure Your Developers Have the Very Best Tools Available
1 minutes read.

As always, something to start the weekend with a huge smile on your face. You can send this photo to new engineers before they join the company, to see if they're happy with their new working station. Just don't forget to add in a tiny font "this is a joke, we don't actually have chairs."

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The Value of Transparency
5 minutes read.

The biggest value I found with transparency is figuring out what really makes you tick and putting it to words. Trying to be proactive about what you value most, setting your expectations early, and sharing your lessons learned are huge multiplier for your career. I love these observations by Cap: "Obfuscation creates concern (valid or not) and fear about the future" and "the less people know, the more they worry about those things"

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Making Architecture Work in Microservice Organizations
11 minutes read.

The team at Gilt with a very interesting approach on how to architect the organization to make microservice architecture scale as their team grows. The Architecture Board is an inspiring effort to allow quick decision making while not sacrificing bigger goals that the entire org can benefit from. I'm sure that Gilt will continue to iterate on the way they're making these architecture decisions, and how they empower their teammates to make local decisions. It is posts like this one that make me happy to see how our industry is becoming more transparent, so we could all learn from it and try it out in our company.

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How to Create a Great Intern Culture
4 minutes read.

This is how building an engineering brand feels like. Khan Academy executing for the long term game. What would you take from it? How can you build such a brand? What can you do now to start small?

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Entrepreneurship and Depression
5 minutes read.

Kyle Wild is such an exceptionally inspiring leader. My tip of the week, in addition to reading this post, is to follow him on Twitter. "I’m trying to create a big, successful company with a conscious, philosophical approach. People need to know that this is strategic, not just ethical!"

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Life After Human Error
18 minutes read.

"We have lots and lots of words to describe failure, there are hundreds. We have hardly any words, though, to describe success... Both failure and success come from the same source" - Really interesting talk, one that fits well with last week's Injecting failure to production. Figuring out how people and systems behave under certain pressure, as part of our ordinary work, can lead to most of the benefits we'll gain by conducting postmortems. If you're running retrospectives and postmortems in your company, you'll find this talk by Steven Shorrock invaluable.

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The Fault in Our Email
6 minutes read.

Sanders Kleinfeld with a funny (in a sad way) post that should have appeared on The Onion. Will make both you and me smile. You'll enjoy Sanders's post while I'll enjoy the irony of you reading this post because I sent you an email. Jokes aside, his last sentence is key to keep your sanity and productivity. Own your time.

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@sethwlieberman: If your company culture is bad, building momentum is like herding rocks.

@SarahBird: It’s hard to get started and you feel like you’re wasting your time. Then it starts to generate its own momentum. That’s magic!