Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Preparing to Be Badass Next Year
5 minutes read.

Using the 3-1 method can be helpful to focus on things you can turn from good to great, without feeling the pressure to be perfect at EVERYTHING. The hardest part is figuring out a way to practice gradual improvements while building some feedback loop to quickly figure out if you're on the right track. The easiest path I found was to explicitly mention to someone else that I need their feedback on a certain skill I'm trying to improve (e.g. giving a talk in front of an audience) and asking them to write down notes while I talk and share their feedback with me. What are you trying to improve? What would a good feedback loop would be like for you?

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Meetings in San Francisco 😕
1 minutes read.

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

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Structured Compensation at Gumroad
4 minutes read.

Having the company's compensation publicly available can reduce a lot of biases and negotiation conflicts (i.e. "they got paid more $ as they aggressively played the offers between multiple companies"). Worth reading the two articles Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad's CEO) mentions under "Some light reading" that get more context.

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Code Review in Remote Teams (Or Any Other Team With Async Pull Requests)
10 minutes read.

Sean Hammond's post is the best one I've read about conducting effective code reviews. I feel that all of his advice are super relevant to my team as well, where we don't work remotely but we do use async Pull Requests (via github). Here is why it's so important: "Code reviews are one of the main places in which your team culture is enacted, and unpleasant code reviews are a side-effect of a lack of deliberate team culture. Use code reviews to deliberately foster a positive, patient and friendly culture."

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Mark Zuckerberg: Building Jarvis
8 minutes read.

Having your CEO building a fun side-project is a great way to demonstrate your core value (in Facebook's case: "move fast!"). Above all though, I enjoyed reading the section "Facebook Engineering Environment", as it demonstrates a nice way to show appreciation to the org in front of the world.

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The Work of an Experienced Software Developer: Perception vs. Reality.
1 minutes read.

Figuring out your known unknowns skills is an endless journey, mostly as you learn that there are plenty of unknown unknowns that hide beneath so many layers of misjudged simplicity. This single image is a great example.

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Is Your Stand-Up Worth the Time?
3 minutes read.

I disagree with the conclusion presented by Tom Sommer, but I think it's an important topic that should require us to re-think about every meeting we attend. If daily standup meeting are not providing any value to the team, then I agree it should be canceled. The only question is what would make it more efficient tool to sync and get others accountable?

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The Managerial Entitlement Complex
2 minutes read.

A must read by Jason Fried: "Any manager who expects a response from an employee at any time of night has an entitlement complex. Any manager who expects someone to get back to them at 4pm on a Sunday has an entitlement complex. Any manager who thinks someone’s life comes second to their work has an entitlement complex."

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@kellan: Dunbar number isn’t a constant, its a function of how good the tribal narrative is.

@jasonfried: Work ethic has a lot more to do with showing up on time and being reliable than it does working 80 hours.