Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

How Will You Measure Your Life?
8 minutes read.

Clayton M. Christensen passed away this week, which caught me by surprise. His ideas had a massive effect on my thinking and desire to live a meaningful life. I want to go back and reread his books that I have. I will leave you with this profound insight from Clayton: "Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question — you have to want to know — in order to open up the space for the answer to fit." -- Which questions are you asking now to open up the space you need? Do you give yourself some time to stop and think about it? RIP Clayton, you will be missed.

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The Most Frustrating Thing About Being a Designer Is That Everyone Thinks They Can Provide Input but It Just Makes the Process Slower and the Output Worse. This Price List Helps Get That Point Across Beautifully. 😆
1 minutes read.

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

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High Output Management for (Non-managing) Tech Leads
5 minutes read.

I'd share this post by Andrew Hao with technical leaders in your organization, so they could learn about high leverage activities they should block time for. My favorite takeaway for me was: "The lead doesn’t have direct managerial authority, and in many ways, that is your superpower. Your authority comes in a tactical form, and that oftentimes makes input easier to swallow (than, say, if it came from your boss). You may find that your teammates find it easier to open up to you when they find that you are a safe person to confide in".

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What’s Your Favorite "Do Things That Don't Scale" Example? (Thread)
4 minutes read.

An inspiring thread for those of you who consider building a new product/tool. Do not think of scale before you hurt a little. This might turn out to be a differentiator for you: "Customer support. The bar for it has historically been set so ridiculously low, people just assume their feedback/issues go to /dev/null. When it doesn't, it's magical to them."

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Why Hootsuite’s CEO Appointed an Employee to Change Dumb Company Rules
5 minutes read.

"Generally, we triage efforts based on a rudimentary points system: The number of people impacted by a bad process is weighed against the estimated time needed to fix it. But it’s not really an exact science. Ultimately, just trying something, even if it only leads to marginal improvement, is better than the status quo." -- Who in your company is in charge for looking at cross-teams and departments broken systems? Most likely, you're now at the size worth thinking about it, as this marginal improvement might impact a lot of people.

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Technical Research and Preparation
8 minutes read.

Keavy McMinn with one of my favorite posts this week. I found myself reading many of her posts, and sharing them with a few experienced engineers in my team. I'd read a few times the section on "How can we prepare for minimal negative consequences?" and more specifically this insight: "But our meticulous technical research gave us the confidence to add new functionality cleanly, on a solidly prepared work surface, which doubtlessly saved us and our colleagues from being paged due to exceptions, later."

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How I Planned My Solo Retreat
4 minutes read.

Pre-planning is more critical than most of us understand. This is true when working on a new feature (doing a proper Design Review) or finding some time to work on important-yet-not-urgent tasks that were waiting for too long: "One of the main things that made this retreat so effective was the pre-planning. I put quite a bit of thought into my game plan, so I’d have a concrete idea of what things I’d be working on and where I’d be working from." - I took a solo retreat 3 months ago and managed to make good progress, focusing on areas in my life I wanted to be more intentional about.

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Being a Noob
3 minutes read.

"[T]he feeling of being a noob is inversely correlated with actual ignorance." -- Paul Graham reminds us that keeping a beginner's mind is critical for knowledge workers, even if others will ridicule us for it sometimes. Remind yourself that "the more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally."

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@kellan: Performance review season: people take more risks when you take more risks on them.

@joulee: In honor of @claychristensen, how do you want to measure the success of your life when you’re near the end?