Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

One Bite at A Time: Partitioning Complexity
5 minutes read.

Kent Beck shares years of experience with these practices and mental states to keep him effective. This observation is extremely important: "Many of the strategies above sacrifice short-term efficiency in order to keep my feet moving. What really slows me down is not programming slowly, it is getting overwhelmed, losing my confidence, and not programming at all."

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When an API Query Returns an HTML-formatted Error.
1 minutes read.

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

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Veteran CTO Answers Your Top Startup-Building Questions
16 minutes read.

Adil Ajmal answers 12 hard questions on building teams, hiring, and process. I highly recommend reading Adil's answer on "How does your technical organization work with the other operational components of the company?" -- his answer there is brilliant, and something we try to apply in our company: "... whether the non-tech group thought of the technical team as a service organization for them where they could just give them instructions, or whether they considered them a partner who could jointly solve problems with them."

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Running in Circles: Why Agile Isn’t Working and What We Do Differently
6 minutes read.

"People in our industry think they stopped doing waterfall and switched to agile. In reality they just switched to high-frequency waterfall." -- do not miss the section "Uphill strategies" -- this is where management, tech leads and product managers should focus on, so others can enjoy the rhythm of progress.

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The Right Way to Start a Company
5 minutes read.

"Alok once said to me that passion comes from success, and I think that’s right." -- I'm a huge believer in momentum. It's true when you try to lead a feature, it's true when you need to reach a deadline and it's true when you're dealing with the ups & downs of leading a company.

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Think Back to What You Were Doing 5, 10, 15+ Years Ago. Really Visualize It. What Advice Would You Give Your Younger Self? Is It Consistent? (Thread)
3 minutes read.

Naval Ravikant ask you to answer the above, focusing on yourself -- "Honestly doing the exercise is far more interesting than reading other people’s answers." -- I thought exactly where I worked, what I did during that time (still no kids) and which challenges kept me up at night. Try it.

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Advice From A 19 Year Old Girl & Software Developer
6 minutes read.

Lydia Hallie's story took me back in time. While I had a different path than her, it's fun to see how much passion young kids have towards programming when you frame it like this: "Programming is for anyone who loves to create, who loves to get out of their comfort zone, and for anyone who loves to improve themselves!"

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Getting Feedback
4 minutes read.

Allison McMillan shares the questions you should ask others to get the feedback you need in order to improve. This topic of collecting feedback from peers is something that comes up a lot during my 1:1s with my teammates. It's important that they'll get feedback on the way they mentor others, communicate progress and create momentum. It's even more important to collect feedback when ti comes to decision making and conflict resolution. It's our job to build a culture where people will feel open enough to share that.

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@kelseyhightower: Criticism is easy. Creating something worth criticizing is the hard part.

@jewelia: The best way -- I have found -- to make progress on the "important but not urgent" work is to carve off time each week write and reflect.