Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

I Could Build This During the Weekend
4 minutes read.

This is a painful lesson you learn with time: "It's easy to oversimplify problems and try new, leaner technologies that optimize for our use cases. However, when scaling it to the rest of the organization, we start to see the dragons. People that didn't build their software the right way. Entire tech stacks depending on libraries that teams can't update due to reasonsTM. Quickly, we start realizing that our lean way of doing things may not serve most situations." -- It's a costly one, as it affects people (how we make decisions) and code (what needs to be refactored now). Excellent writing by João Alves.

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Bringing Production Back Up After a Crash, but Not Solving the Underlying Issue
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

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Decision Making vs. Decision Understanding
7 minutes read.

This post by John Cutler should be included in the onboarding plan of new employees. We need to learn to respect and appreciate the friction in working together on complex problems. This is how you discover conflicts and blind spots, practice putting your thoughts in writing, take the time to form an opinion and change it a few times, and overall - learn faster.

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The Paradox of Genius: Why Long-Term Thinking Wins
6 minutes read.

James Currier shares many nuggets worth thinking about as the company matures, and you're trying to build a sustainable business for decades. Some of my favorites were: "The problem is the new innovation is always in a territory where there are low profits. The excellence that they’re all working toward, the optimization and the efficiency, is not useful here." and "I am really interested in companies and individuals who are the only, who’ve become the only. And that to me is a much better place to be than just merely the best."

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The Art of Self-Organizing Engineering Teams
8 minutes read.

I think this post by Tom Sommer can be beneficial for new Engineering Managers who seek to build a team that works well together. Share it with managers and tech leads in your company, as they can use it to analyze areas worth investing in.

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Forget Multi-Tasking. It's Context-Switching That Matters
7 minutes read.

I'd read twice the section about "Hone your position fixing skills" as every over-achiever will feel they don't get enough done. It's learning to define the "good enough" and appreciate the power of doing that every day as it compounds.

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10 of My Founder Friends Are Forces of Nature. Their Startups Are Now Worth 400ドルM+ Each. 4 Behaviors I've Observed (Thread)
3 minutes read.

"Momentum is about rate of iteration and persistence, not brilliance. I don’t know one force of nature founder who isn’t strongly biased toward taking action." -- this is probably the most significant leverage I see in great leaders. Sounds easy or obvious, but very few do it well. The entire thread by Julian Shapiro is spot on.

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35 Principles for 35 Years
6 minutes read.

I enjoy everything Shawn Wang writes. An impressive set of insights for you to think about during the weekend. You might want to experiment with a few of them, for example, "Build Tools For Yourself." I launched downleft.com and managerreadme.com to scratch my own itch.

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@johncutlefish: Something I've learned (and keep learning) as "product person" - your appetite and tolerance for uncertainty may be *way higher* than other people. But it is on you to figure that out, not them

@shl: Read before sleeping, write after waking.