Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Debugging a Disaster in Front of the Entire World: Realtime Streaming of DB Restore for GitLab
12 minutes read.

Company's culture is measured when shit really hits the fan. When GitLab had a serious Database Incident a couple of days ago, they decided to publicly manage the crisis in writing and also streaming the all thing live on YouTube. How many companies truly follow their core values as GitLab did this time? #opshugs to the team, and thank you for showing us all that stupid mistakes happen to all of us, and being brave to share your learnings with us.

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Management, as Described in Browser Tabs
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. This is basically how my Chrome tabs looked like this week.

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Culture Codes
5 minutes read.

Great initiative from Tettra: "A collection of culture decks, core values, mission statements, and more from real companies." -- nice way to easily browse great culture slides by great companies.

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The New Grad Rotation Program: Optimizing Team Fit and Enhancing Collaboration
6 minutes read.

The team at MongoDB share their story of getting new grads to learn and provide value, while explaining how this program adjusted over time. Once you reach around 50 engineers or so, such programs can provide a meaningful boost to your organization.

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Team of Teams & Complexity: An Approach for Breaking Down Silos
5 minutes read.

Figuring out a common goal to align teams around might sound easy. It's easier for people to do local optimization. Less friction. The challenge is in building a good story that is easy to follow and emotionally relate to, removing people who are ego or control driven, and get people to enjoy working together as a team on a common problem, rather than falling in love with their current local solutions.

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Let’s Stop Calling Them ‘Soft Skills’
6 minutes read.

Seth Godin is such a brilliant writer, it feels that I should only put this here and recommend you to read the entire post: "It turns out that what actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes and perceptions of the people who do the work. Culture defeats strategy, every time." -- oh, and please read the section on "Theft".

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How to Run 1:1 Meetings That Work for 2
8 minutes read.

David Lynch (EM at Intercome) with a great post you should share with Engineering Managers in your company. People don't mention it enough, but creating a safe place for your teammates is critical in effective 1:1s. Even if the discussion is around the other person's desire to leave the team or even the company, they should feel comfortable saying it like it is. They should trust you, they should feel that you care about them. It doesn't mean that you put them before the company or the team.

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Why Do Programmers Need Long Periods of Silence in Order to Do Their Job?
3 minutes read.

Protect your team from distractions, and share this post with non-engineers if they'd like to understand why you worry so much about it. This question is great, so take a few minutes to check all of the answers, to pick the one you can relate with most.

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@rkoutnik: They're not bugs, they're "Alt-Features"

@cperciva: Doing backups? Good. Testing backups? Better. Making fun of a company which didn't? Please stop. Things suck enough for them already.