Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

BCC Is Evil, and a Cry for Help to Email Makers
3 minutes read.

Roee Adler will make you re-think of BCC-ing someone when you send out emails. This post will certainly make me more conscious about it in the future, and I believe that BCC is acceptable only if it's well informed in the email (e.g. moving someone to BCC after an introduction). Well said: "As a consequence, your brain will automatically tag this person as someone who may have something to hide, and you’ll develop a concern for the level of honesty and transparency of that person"

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This Is the Dream (Photo)
1 minutes read.

"Incredible day yesterday. Joe, Nate and I presented to all 1500 Airbnb employees. 6 years ago, this was the company" - This is how success looks like, growing a company of 3 founders to over 1500 employees. I'm happy for them, and cheering for all of the brave souls out there who work hard to build great companies.

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The Chaos Theory of Startups
4 minutes read.

I really love observation by Andy Weissman on how startups can benefit from understanding Chaos Theory, and why having a decision-making process is key for figuring out the smallest change that can produce the biggest unpredictable value. As leaders, we need to help scaling that framework, that state-of-mind to others, rather than figuring out immediate solutions.

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Are You Looking to Hire the Best, or the Most convenient?
2 minutes read.

The future of work is almost here. The tools are getting better, and it's not uncommon to see great fully distributed companies (GitHub, Automattic and Buffer just to name a few). There is still a big culture change that need to happen, most of it will be around setting very clear expectation on how to work together (communication), hiring/dating (e.g. 1 months contractor before full hire), measuring value etc. What do you think? Would you like to hire remote developers? What about working remote yourself? How would you make it work in your team?

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Maslow’s Pyramid of Code Review
2 minutes read.

Charles-Axel Dein with another excellent post on making sure you're producing value over time. Share it with your engineers, so they can make sure that Code Reviews are effective. Also, worth reading the comments on reddit (link inside).

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3 Great Engineering Management Talks From 2014
3 minutes read.

Julia Grace shares 3 great Engineering Management talks, including her takeaways from each one. Already saw two out of the three and cannot recommend it enough!

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Twitter's CEO: How I Stay Focused Under Fire
4 minutes read.

I'm a big fan of Dick Costolo. His investment in building great leadership at Twitter, teaching a quarterly sxi-hours course, is how you scale a company. Pretty amazing to hear Dick's story on scaling Twitter from 300 employees to over 3600. My favorite part in this post is "No Sidebars, No Sideshows".

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Pairing as Pruning
4 minutes read.

A must read post by Kent Beck on the economics of pair programming - "Pairing isn't a "go fast" strategy, it's a "waste less" strategy that ends up going faster if there's enough uncertainty... When the problem and solutions spaces are large and uncertain, pruning reduces waste... Fixed problems with fixed solutions don't require pairing, they require automation (and automation is rich in uncertainty)."

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@pashabitz: Resume in a text file. The next frontier for the hipster programmer.

@weird_hist: The Japanese word 'tsundoku' means buying books but never getting around the reading them. #useful