Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

The Keys to Scaling Yourself as a Technology Leader
12 minutes read.

Fall in love with the people and the mission, not the process and solution. Adam Pisoni's focus on defining the roles and responsibilities, breaking it apart from titles, allowed Yammer to grow with a lot of flexibility into how things being built. Plenty of great gems from Adam that you can take and apply in your company. Also, even if you're short on time, read "Managing Tension" section towards the end. An extremely important observation there.

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Programming in One GIF
1 minutes read.

You think that building software is predictable. Think again. My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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How a Small Team of 13 Engineers Successfully Builds a Product on 8 Different Platforms
5 minutes read.

It's so much harder to optimize communication and process then it is to optimize your code for performance or scale. The emotions involved makes it so hard to judge tradeoffs and create a strong alignment, unless you put a lot of emphasis on the core values the team posses, and the way you want to build everything around it (prioritization, decision making, communication, tooling etc.) Great tips by Edmond Lau, based on his experience at Quora and now Quip.

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Five Years of Building Instagram
6 minutes read.

Everything about Instagram is remarkable, but reaching 400 millions users in 5 years is just astonishing. Mike Krieger shares Instagram's biggest milestones and takeaways, making their achievements even bigger when you hear about their relatively small team that managed to ship things fast by focusing on one problem at a time and implementing the simplest solution first.

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Why Organizations Don’t Learn
18 minutes read.

Long read, but holds a lot of great observations on why companies fail to continue and learn over time. Some recommended parts you should read even if tight on time: "Embrace and teach a growth mindset", "Failure to use one’s strengths" and "Encourage reflection after doing."

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What It's Like (Ignite Talk)
6 minutes read.

Baron Schwartz with an Ignite talk I really enjoyed listening to, as you can feel his honesty in his voice, talking about the powers that motivate him to push forward: "The recognition that being a nerd is actually an honorable profession just like being a sculpture" -- check out the video at the end of the post or read the text format in the post itself.

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High Performers vs. Workaholics: 7 Sublte Differences
4 minutes read.

"A high performer works hard in healthy sustainable ways and feels happy and inspired. A workaholic works hard in unhealthy unsustainable ways and feels unhappy and burned out." -- I needed to read it, you might learn a lot more about yourself after reading this post.

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Scaling Up, the Three Stages of a Startup and Common Scaling Mistakes
5 minutes read.

Some the mistakes covered by Casey Winters are things I saw numerous times in different companies. Figuring out the evolution companies are going through, and how to communicate that shift effectively with your team is hard to get done correctly. You often judge your new reality with the prism of the previous phase, triggering a lot of bad vibe by different people in the team. Recognizing it and proactively address it makes all the difference in the world if you want to scale your team and keep the momentum going.

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@rstevens: Be the person your coffee thinks you can be.

@gdibner: I can't get over how people use the word "focus" to list the 27 things they do.