Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

"Jeff, What Does Day 2 Look Like?" – Amazon Shareholder Letter 2017
6 minutes read.

I found myself basically copy&paste the entire thing as I loved every word and sentence in this letter. Do yourself a favor and read this shareholder letter by Jeff Bezos.

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"Sorry Officer, My Car Has Old Version of TensorFlow, I'll Update It Tonight"
1 minutes read.

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

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Measuring Software Engineering Competency
5 minutes read.

Very much like the Joel Spolsky's test, these questions can help you when you're looking to join a new company and you want to make sure there is a good alignment of expectations. As a company that wants to attract strong talent, use these questions to write a blog post about your core strengths.

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Overcome the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team
5 minutes read.

"5 Dysfunctions of a Team" is a great book for new managers and tech leads. Crisp Apples' tips on dealing with these symptoms are spot on, specifically around dealing with the fear of conflicts. I find myself following this advice internally or when talking with my friends who deal with similar situations in their companies: "Interrupt and remind one another in real time to not retreat from a healthy debate when they start to feel uncomfortable."

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Keeping Information Flowing as You Grow
5 minutes read.

Dealing with information at scale is something I believe many of us are facing with. Once you reach the point of ~20-30 employees, you need to start thinking of ways to align people and being transparent (at least internally) about your failures, successes, and lessons learned. Rob Kenny from Intercom shares their process which can be a good starting point to consider your current process and the one you'd like to have in the future.

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Why Great Executives Avoid Shiny Objects
3 minutes read.

"We all know people who love to talk up their game but never deliver. People chase shiny objects precisely because opening is orders-of-magnitude easier than closing." -- a hundred times this. Running around new ideas/frameworks/languages is fun and interesting, but we should always put our eyes on the outcome.

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Three Quotes From Early GitHubbers
4 minutes read.

Always prefer to lose a teammate to another team than to a different company: "I got drinks with PJ one day, told him I wanted out from the enterprise world, and he was like yeah sure, I definitely get it, let’s figure something out. There were logistics to sort, people to hire, but it was pretty straightforward agreement.... Sometimes roles change, sometimes people change, and I think it makes a lot of sense to initially try pivoting someone into a new role. Replacing people is hard and expensive."

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Should a CTO Keep on Coding?
4 minutes read.

Matt Aimonetti with a post that is relevant both to CTO and VP Engineering at some point. If you don't help scaling others, keeping the business on track, you're not doing the company any justice.

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@sean_a_rose: I think I've gotten better at being a PM by reading significantly fewer "tech" things and reverting back to the mindset of a normal human.

@polotek: If your company says it values diversity and inclusion, but your eng managers don't actively participate, you're lying to ppl.