Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

PagerDuty Open Sourced Their Internal Security Training!
20 minutes read.

Treating security and privacy as a first-class citizen is becoming such a critical asset for organizations. PagerDuty's internal security training is now available to all of us to learn from. You can take that and apply in your company (with appropriate modifications), to better educate your team on risks and mitigations. This is a brilliant work by the PagerDuty team that I know we will use in our company. Oh, and the subdomain is a great touch!

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Development → Staging → Production
1 minutes read.

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

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How to Manage All-Hands Customer Service
5 minutes read.

Having everyone take part of helping the customer be successful with your product is hard. Some people will thrive, some will struggle. James Glazebrook shares the pains and iterations in Basecamp's process, where these two captured my attention: "Basecamp is a company which values independence. The best approach was to give everyone everything they need to succeed, and then get out of their way." and "We didn’t get it right on our first try, and we’ll make more mistakes in the future. It’s worth it."

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Write Useful Mission Statements in 3 Easy Steps
4 minutes read.

Nick Caldwell (VP Eng. @ Reddit) writes about something that is near and dear to my heart. I believe that mission statements and clear goals are essential frameworks for managers and leaders to set the path. The pitfall is how we usually execute on it: "... most mission statements are best used for inspirational posters and not for guiding teams. They are written to be flowery and optimistic. Or they’re too generic. They lack teeth. They lack a sense of urgency." So to make an effective mission statement for your team, apply this rule: "Mission statements should be about the urgent present." -- Worth experimenting in your team? Share it with others and try it out.

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Talking to the Board Is the Easy Part: A Series Reflecting on the Lessons Every CSO Needs to Learn
6 minutes read.

Geoff Belknap (CSO at Slack) has a role that can feel very lonely and under a lot of stress. This is why I enjoyed his writing and point of view on how to deal with it: all of his 4 takeaways are spot on, but my favorite one is without a doubt "Build a network of your peers." -- you have to break out of that feeling of being completely alone leading such effort.

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Becoming A Manager of Managers
4 minutes read.

Tom Sommer with one lesson that I've learned the hard way when I first became a manager of managers: "Your first instinct is to jump in and fix things up. You most likely have a theory about what is going on. You might have dealt with similar situations in the past. Time is pressing and the business wants results. Let me repeat it because it is crucial: Do not get involved directly. You have to support your new manager to handle the problem, without spelling out a solution or taking over."

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A Journey From Junior Developer to Technical Lead
11 minutes read.

David Boyne with a post I wish I could read when starting as a junior engineer. So much of it was "figure it out by yourself" without any path or guidance to follow. Share it with junior or experienced engineers in your team that want to know how the next step might look like, and how to get there (faster).

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Why Should You Want to Lead People?
8 minutes read.

Amit Goldshmidt with a post that existing and future managers should read as it covers so well the motivation you should have to make to make such transition (different path, not a promotion). I often ask in my 1:1s with engineers that I believe to have the desire and capability to lead teams in the future "What did you enjoy most in this project?" -- from my experience, great managers will share what they've learned about the individuals who worked with them. They will share a personal story, or how their perception changed along the way.

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@shanselman: The most important thing you can do once you've reach the top is to send a ladder back down.

@karen_meep: My OCD is to make the implicit explicit.