Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful
30 minutes read.

I've spent hours reading some of the mental models covered here by Gabriel Weinberg, navigating between different explanation of each model and thinking of my own scenarios where applying such models could have helped me to better deal with the situation. Explore and ponder how to make the most out of it in your day to day dilemmas.

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How a Corporate Hierarchy Works
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. Delegating hurts.

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The Conjoined Triangles of Senior-Level Development
12 minutes read.

Figuring out your own defintion of Senior Engineer is hard, so much so that you can see it in this sentence I'm sure you've experienced before: "It’s completely possible for a person applying to multiple dev jobs to be evaluated as junior at one, mid-level at another, and even senior at another, with very little feedback as to why." -- While I'm not sure I agree with it all, I feel it's a honest attempt to make this defintion concrete. Making it helpful. Brandon Hays ends the post with this golden nugget: "Let’s bring open source thinking to how we hire and grow our people."

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Sunk Costs and Managing Assholes
5 minutes read.

One of my favorite reads for this week by Jessica Rose. "Having your team build informal processes to work around bad actors creates an environment where additional time and energy costs are included in all team activities. It’s the HR version of technical debt, draining the team’s time, energy and morale." -- so much truth in this statement. I highly recommend reading the section "You can afford to lose toxic people".

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Reducing Risks by Taking Risks
4 minutes read.

This post by Yonatana Maman reminds of me Stripe's "learning from kill -9" post a few years back. Experimenting is how you can gain real confidence in the strength of your system. Are you doing enough to play with your system, figuring out single point of failure by playing the role of a "chaos monkey"?

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How to Lead as a New Mom in the Tech Industry
8 minutes read.

Cynthia Maxwell (iOS Engineering Director at Slack) shares some great advice on how to juggle being a new mom with being a leader in your organization. I highly recommend reading Lessons 3 "Don’t be in a rush" -- this is something I think many new parents (myself included) deal with, and should pay extra attention to.

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Team Lead – Here Is What Your Boss Isn’t Telling You, Yet Still Expects of You
5 minutes read.

Figuring out a path to building a scalable team is something we rarely discuss, but as a Team Lead this is our responsibility to plan, pursue and implement. In this post I've shared a few observations I had on implicit expectations we have as leaders in our organization.

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A Precious Hour
5 minutes read.

Michael Lopp (aka Rands) with a post that every manager should read, as the pain will feel so familiar: "Poorly written emails are an early warning of intense busy... but I am not in The Zone. I’m just busy." -- What's your way of investing in the builder in you? What do you do to stay creative? How do you play?

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@colettecello: Architect: "we should break this down into 6 microservices" Me: "you have 6 teams who hate each other?" Architect: "how did you know that?"

@danicgross: New term: "Gym MRR". Your users are paying, but only because they forgot to cancel.