Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Crafting the First Mile of Product
8 minutes read.

This post provides so many nuggets for creating a great first mile for your product (and it goes much deeper than finding your MVP). It also made me think of using these frameworks for other areas around building a great company. For example, check "Defy The Product Lifecycle" and think about the process used in your company, and how much it affects everyone when it becomes more complex. Employees flock to simple process.

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Wanted: Ninja Rockstar Code Monkey Hacker Unicorn
2 minutes read.

One of the funniest posts I've seen lately. My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. My favorite part was: "Must have: 5 years of experience in a three-year-old technology".

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Balancing Development Desire With Product Goals
5 minutes read.

Your job as a leader is to remind the team your purpose and mission as a company and a team. Technology stack or "beautiful" architecture are never the goal. Delegating ownership to the people who will do the work and explicitly asking for deliberate planning of smaller deliverables are my biggest takeaways from such dilemma.

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We Built Voice Modulation to Mask Gender in Technical Interviews. Here’s What Happened.
6 minutes read.

Fascinating experiment with non-trivial findings (bias has less impact than attrition after failure) by Aline Lerner. Reminds me a lot of the Growth mindset versus Fixed mindset when it comes to learning and coping with failure during technical interviews.

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Six Things Junior Developers Wished They Could Tell You, and How You Can Use Them to Become a Better Teacher
6 minutes read.

Netta Bondy represents a missing voice of people who seek to start a career and doing their best to earn their spot. I found dealing with "We aren’t sure we’re good enough" and "We get bored too" as the biggest challenge for mentors of junior developers, at least based on my career. It requires planning ahead, rather than "giving them some basic tasks".

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How to Give Feedback to Your Boss
4 minutes read.

We all want to grow and improve. Providing feedback is truly difficult, and when it comes to providing feedback to your boss people often avoid it to reduce any possible tension. Claire Lew with great tips on how to start such discussion (her email templates are incredible) and how to prepare for it, to make it effective and helpful.

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What Is Your Best Advice for a Developer to Write Better Code?
5 minutes read.

Two perfect comments in this thread: "Weeks of programming can save hours of planning is a favorite quote of mine" and "While this is true, the opposite can also be true. That's called "Analysis Paralysis"" -- enjoyed reading this thread, and talk about it with a few friends. This question has a lot of depth into it, and can easily be a great topic for a full hour discussion during lunch.

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The Secret to Growing Your Engineering Career if You Don't Want to Manage
5 minutes read.

Understanding that "Technical Ability + Experience ≠ Impact" is probably the best thing you can do to your own career growth. Edmond Lau's tips should be shared with anyone who strives to take the individual contributor ladder and move the needle for the business using their own unique technical capabilities.

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@nolancaudill: Managing is pretty easy after you understand that reality is subjective, cause-and-effect are simplifications and humans are irrational.

@joedamato: I've spent all my extrovert coins on my talk and it is now time to go disappear into my couch for a year.