Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Getting Your Team to Adopt New Technology
5 minutes read.

Brilliant post by Ben Kamens (Lead Dev at Khan Academy), one that you should share with every Technical Lead in your company. From my experience, being able to create a solid game plan for adopting a new technology (or concept) is one of the key parameters of great Technical Leads. It involves both figuring out every technical details while also leading the team through this change - dealing with concerns, conducting risk analysis, being open and communicative, break the change into smaller chunks, educating the team etc. Highly recommended!

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Behind the Scenes: How the Tesla Model S Is Made (Video)
5 minutes read.

Five minutes of engineering perfection. It's really hard to add anything to such a remarkable process, other than you have to watch it.

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Make Every Word Matter
5 minutes read.

Des Traynor (of Intercom.io) with a really important post about the connection between companies' communication and results. This observation also applies to each and every one of us, as individuals. If you care about your career path, you simply owe it to yourself to read it and judge the quality and style of your own communication. Great read!

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How to Scale a Development Team
12 minutes read.

Adam Wiggins shares his own story of scaling the team at Heroku, ranging from picking the right tools and process at each phase, to breaking responsibilities without losing product or ownership cohesion. It's packed with insightful examples!

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How to Get Busy People to Take Action When You Send an Email
5 minutes read.

Mark Suster with 7 tips you can use to write an effective email. I've used Mark's advices when I wrote emails for high-profile individuals, asking for quick help or advice both for SoftwareLeadWeekly and TeamLeadToolbox. It works.

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How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO
20 minutes read.

If you're a technical person who's eventually aiming for a CTO position, you'd appreciate Ian Langworth's (of Artillery) thoughts and lessons learned. If you're short on time, you have to read "Failures in communication" and "Engineering utopias aren’t easy".

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The Part They Don't Tell You About Startup Team Building
3 minutes read.

Tomasz Tunguz talks about the transition of a manager who successfully scaled his team, and now figuring out how to stay out of the way. As someone who experienced this transition before, it can be very fulfilling while also scary, as it's hard to imagine your next challenge. Read this post carefully and share it with your management team. A great way to overcome this problem is by making it visible to others and allowing the business owners to offer a few possible suggestions for a new role or adjustment. Visibility and open communication are a great way to retain talent for the long run.

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@alignedleft: Please stop posting jobs for "___ ninjas." It is disrespectful to the ninja community, and confusing for ninjas actively looking for work.

@KentBeck: If you can't make engineering decisions based on data, then make engineering decisions that result in data.