Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Get Out of Your Head: How to Quiet Your Thoughts - A Short Guide to Overthinking
7 minutes read.

"In fact, our thoughts are super flakey and unreliable. They’re mostly fleeting scraps of consciousness that we project random external factors onto" -- For those of you, like me, who feel we need to chase a million things at once while judging ourselves every second of it. The practice of thinking without acting was a powerful observation for me.

Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

Developer’s Serenity Prayer
1 minutes read.

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

Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

In Pursuit of Production Minimalism
8 minutes read.

"At Heroku, we'd hold regular "burn parties" to recognize the effort that went into deprecating old products and technology" -- Share Brandur Leac's post with your entire engineering team and have a debate on your system complexity, design decisions (/principles) and where you want to focus going forward in the next 3 to 6 months.

Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

How to Recruit and Hire When You Need to Move Fast
7 minutes read.

Helpful framework by Elad Gil for those of you experiencing hyper-growth. My biggest takeaway was to build a framework that works for you. Write it down so you could share it internally, execute on it and iterate as you learn what works and what doesn't.

Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

Building Operating Cadence With Remote Teams (Video)
60 minutes read.

Great talk by Wade Foster, sharing his lessons learned from Zappier and the practices that helped them grow to 160 employees while being 100% remote. Having a team format where managers and their teammates can share a clear status so it would be organized across the organization is powerful: You can analyze common patterns you'd like to fix, make action items and follow-ups on them really effectively. Even if you're not remote, this is an interesting practice to try.

Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

Some Heuristics to Make Decisions. Please Add Your Own and Challenge These. (Thread)
5 minutes read.

Shane Parrish is insightful as always (worth following him on Twitter!). Remarkable thread with Shane's ideas while others participate and share their own. I loved Melanie Sakowski's "Can I be absolutely positive that my thought about this is true?"

Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

Exactly What to Say When Recruiters Ask You to Name the First Number... and Other Negotiation Word-For-Words
5 minutes read.

Share this post by Aline Lerner with your friends who currently interview and not sure exactly what to ask for (and how). Bookmark it for the next time you're looking for your next step in your career. Follow Aline's guidance on "What to say when asked to name the first number" as this is the biggest leverage I believe (well, maybe with having multiple offers) to your compensation.

Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

Code Review Review Is the Manager’s Job
7 minutes read.

John Barton with an interesting takeaway on the role of a manager in Code Reviews. I have other thoughts on the subject, although I agree that if the team doesn't practice code reviews the manager should be the one to create the buy-in and start implementing them. Once you have those, I think that Senior Engineers in the team should measure to verify the quality of the code reviews being made by the team. This way they can take ownership and increase their organizational impact by leveraging their unique skill.

Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

@sriramk: Two key elements of aligning large groups of people a) a simple message and maybe more b) repetition. Every time I thought I was repeating myself ad nauseam, I found it wasn't enough and I should have done more.

@utterlymundane: People are great at recognizing the 1 hour meeting that could have been a 5 minute email, and *awful* at recognizing the 6 week email thread that could have been a 15 minute meeting.