Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers Into Remarkable Managers
14 minutes read.

There are rarely posts that are in that quality as the one by David Loftesness (ex-Director of Engineering at Twitter). One of my favorite parts were Loftesness's "event loop" as a way to track your progress as a manager. I've done something similar and wrote about it in my book for conducting "code reviews" for your decisions as a manager. Having a feedback loop in place is extremely powerful. Share it with other Engineering Managers or potential managers in your company, it would save them years of trial and error.

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Vision + Skill + Incentive + People - Action Plan == False Start
1 minutes read.

As always, my humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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Average Manager vs. Great Manager
2 minutes read.

Small nuances really matters. Great illustrations to deliver the point by Julie Zhuo. Worth reading the links at the bottom of the page.

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The Good, Bad and Ugly of Growth (Video)
52 minutes read.

Aaron Quint from Paperless Post tells the story of how they grew from 5 people to over 100 (2 dev to 40), with all of the pains and lessons learned from that journey. Downloaded it to my iPhone and listened to it while traveling NYC this week. Pay extra attention to their Summer Camp idea. It's a great way to attract talent and have them for some time to evaluate how it is to work together while making sure the team has the capacity for it. Also appreciated Aaron's story on his own stepping down of his role as a CTO due to personal burnout, and what he took from that journey in the Q&A part.

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Projects and Companies
3 minutes read.

Sam Altman (Y Combinator's president) explains why you should embrace the "project mindset" for as long as you can, rather than "acting" as a company from day 1: "When you’re working on a project, you can experiment with ideas for a long time. When you have a company, the clock is ticking and people expect results."

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Speed Matters: Why Working Quickly Is More Important Than It Seems
5 minutes read.

Speed reduces friction, which in turn allows people to say "yes!" more often then no, to ask more questions and more granular questions rather than trying to be right in one big attempt (think Hadoop vs Spark). Are you doing enough to speed up your work?

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I Don't Have Enough Time to Develop but That's Alright
2 minutes read.

If reading this post makes you smile, you're probably in a good place in your career. Share it with other Engineering Managers in your company.

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Give It Five Minutes
3 minutes read.

Wonderful advice by Jason Fried if you want your company's culture to allow ideas to prosper and materialize: "Ideas are fragile. They often start powerless. They’re barely there, so easy to ignore or skip or miss... Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work... The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea."

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@hunterwalk: 440ドルb company just radically changed corp structure to advantage innovation while you debate whether your VP will like slide 14 of the ppt

@aza: Always have a side project, so that you can procrastinate productively.