Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Suffering-Oriented Programming: Don't Build Technology Unless You Feel the Pain of Not Having It
5 minutes read.

"I have a mantra for suffering-oriented programming: First make it possible. Then make it beautiful. Then make it fast." -- Nathan Marz (the creator of Apache Storm) with a mantra I think every experienced engineer should follow. I've shared it with my team today as I was going over a few projects we're building these days in my head, thinking of where we can use this mentality better: "It recognizes that attempts to make things generic without a deep understanding of the problem domain will lead to complexity and waste. Designs must always be driven by real, tangible use cases."

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Backend Developer Attempting to Fix a CSS Issue
1 minutes read.

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

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What Makes a Good Goal?
4 minutes read.

To maximize your impact on the organization, you should learn different aspects of the business. This post by Leeor Engel covers the concept of Problem Discovery (check the link to the PDF) and how to set the right goals: "With the new problem statement and goal, it no longer made sense for the chemists to be called upon to even try to solve this problem... [P]oorly framed problems lead to poorly framed goals; which can lead you far astray."

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How Do We Decide What to Work On?
5 minutes read.

"We ship incrementally, iteratively, and have one massive tentpole launch a year. Every month we see how much creators got paid, then we move on. The journey is the fun part, we're not waiting to arrive at some destination." -- I've been using Gumroad for the past 6 years (to sell my book Leading Snowflakes), and became a huge fan of Sahil Lavingia, Gumroad's founder. He has a unique stand on how to build a company, from sharing numbers publically to his story on raising money, firing employees, growing slowly, working with no goals, and more. I recommend reading this post and going to their public Wiki to browse around. I'd love to see more companies write in public, building different types of organizations so we could all learn and copy from them.

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The Lesson to Unlearn
12 minutes read.

This, I think, is the incentive that will get generations to come to stop playing only for grades and diplomas: "I suspect many people implicitly assume that working in a field with bad tests is the price of making lots of money. But that, I can tell you, is false. It used to be true. In the mid-twentieth century, when the economy was composed of oligopolies, the only way to the top was by playing their game. But it's not true now. There are now ways to get rich by doing good work, and that's part of the reason people are so much more excited about getting rich than they used to be. When I was a kid, you could either become an engineer and make cool things, or make lots of money by becoming an executive. Now you can make lots of money by making cool things." -- how many of your software engineers are brilliant, eagerly learning new things and yet didn't complete (or start) their CS degree?

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Here’s What I Learned During My First Year as a People Manager
5 minutes read.

Allison Krausman shares a lot of lessons learned that I think new managers could benefit from. A few that I liked: "My first year as a manager would have been so much harder without the support of my incredibly talented manager. You can’t do this alone, people." and "Being responsible for other people’s careers means follow-through is more important than it ever was before. Doing what you say you will do is an easy but powerful way to build trust between two people. "

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How Naval Ravikant Reads a Book: Reading to Satisfy Genuine Curiosity
4 minutes read.

"The truth is books aren't designed to promote learning. True learning happens with spaced repetition, tackling an idea from different, angles, discussing about to to gain new perspectives, connecting that idea to the knowledge base in our head. Holistic learning. Visceral learning. creating a memory palace or emotional connection to that information." -- I'm trying to read things that make me happy (for a good laugh and/or satisfy curiosity). Things you should be okay with when reading non-fictional books: jumping between chapters, reading the first line of each paragraph, starting at the end, read a few books in parallel, stop reading in the middle, etc.

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@nathanmarz: I find that treating programming as a process of discovery rather than of invention yields vastly superior results

@spakhm: When I was starting my first company I weighed feedback from investors/friends/industry veterans at .85, users at .15. Now it’s the reverse.