Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

How to Write Usefully
7 minutes read.

"Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible." -- Paul Graham is such a great thinker and writer. Follow his advice (I've made a few cards in my Anki Notes) to practice the way you think and share your thoughts in writing.

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Pitstop World Record. Beautiful Teamwork. Wish This Existed for Debugging.
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. I wish this existed early morning, getting my kids organized for kindergarten.

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How to Save a Dying, Low-Morale Team
5 minutes read.

I think that "Change the Narrative, and Provide Solutions" and "Give Positive Feedback, Share Feedback Upward" are two points many managers understand, but very few follow. Excellent takeaways by Alex Tandy that you should consider to adopt or at least discuss with the management team.

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Working With Cross Functional Teams: Master Effective Collaboration in the Workplace
7 minutes read.

Cross-functional teams are hard to implement "correctly". Vinita Bansal offers a practical framework to consider when thinking of applying such structure in your organization. Make sure people understand the tradeoffs in this approach and which benefits you're aiming for, while managing the downsides explicitly. Like design and code, rarely there is wrong and right. We need to understand the tradeoffs and decide based on what fits the company's challenges.

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What Is One Idea That, Once You Learned It, You Started to Notice It Everywhere? (Thread)
4 minutes read.

What a powerful question to ask by James Clear. I enjoyed the variety of perspectives, with this one standing out: "Companies focus a lot on individuals. Managers would benefit from seeing their roles a bit more as environment designers and a bit less as people growers. Not saying growing people isn’t important just that they have more control over the environment."

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The Cascading Productivity System
7 minutes read.

James Mulholland shares his system to maximize energy and time investment in the right areas. I always enjoy reading this type of posts as I tend to copy one or two elements from it to my own method. This time I learned about the Firebreaks checks and took some ideas from James's Annual Meeze.

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Lessons Learned Managing the GitLab Data Team
7 minutes read.

Taylor A Murphy shares his experience and lessons learned building a Data team. Two sections that I felt were profoundly insightful: "It's okay to be a little selfish (to avoid burnout)" and "You need executive buy-in and representation."

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What Is an Engineering Manager Anyway?
3 minutes read.

Doug Arcuri with a concise and valuable post that all managers (or aspiring managers) should read. I appreciate Doug for putting "The most important action of a manager is to hire" first, as without the talent you cannot build a strong team.

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@shl: One well-written blog post can take you farther than the most impressive CV.

@pembleton: If developers in your org are not empowered to decide, on their own, to invest 7h (an entire work day) on fixing weird failures in the CI, you are digging your own technical grave.