Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Creative Exhaust (Video)
16 minutes read.

An inspirational talk by Brad Frost that I love. Everyone building things on the web should watch it and leverage this insight: ״Why do this? Why give away all your knowledge, tips, tricks, resources, of your creative process? At face value, it appears those who openly share are giving away their competitive edge, but it turns out the benefits of sharing are many. Collaboration trumps pure competition. [...] What’s more gratifying? Discovering a technique that improves the performance of your website, or sharing that technique that can help improve the performance of every website? Knitting a single hat, or sharing a video that enables thousands knit their own?״

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Ignoring the Word Limit
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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Professional Maintainers: A Wake-Up Call
7 minutes read.

With the endless security findings and patches around log4j, maybe one of the most used open-source libraries available, one can stop and ask - where are we heading? Filippo Valsorda asks some hard questions we should all think about as we use an ever-growing amount of OSS libraries, tools, and products. How do we (as companies) have more skin in the game so everyone (contributors, users) can benefit from a better outcome?

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The Power of Defaults
14 minutes read.

Understanding the business and how it will manifest (products, M & M&A, etc.) is vital to improving your impact. Educating your team around it is important to help them leverage their unique skills and capabilities. Julian Lehr takes us into a different framing - looking at how companies expand into new layers (psychical or virtual, atoms or bits).

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The Only Thing You Need to Set Your OKRs Properly
4 minutes read.

A concise and effective way to leverage OKRs applying "Product thinking" rather than "Project thinking." Use it to plan next year better and put some good targets to move the business and team forward.

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Expanding My Horizons
4 minutes read.

Justin Jackson wrote one of my favorite posts reads this week. This mindset should be applied to figure out new ways to make a bigger impact in your company or your business: "Our experience limits our imagination. People believe that great entrepreneurs develop novel ideas because they're exceptionally creative, brilliant, and visionary. But the truth is, everything we come up with is a reflection of what we've seen, heard, and experienced. This means if we want to develop better ideas, we need to expose ourselves to new experiences, gain new skills, make new connections, join new communities."

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The Decision-Making Pendulum
5 minutes read.

Candost Dagdeviren with an important reminder, one that is easier said than done, but that's not an excuse: "The balance comes from choosing the right decision-making style in the correct place. Defaulting to any style creates unhappiness and bad results. [..] Of course, there will be objections to the decisions regardless of the style. Validating objections and acting on them (or not) is the last step. The leaders need to have a bias toward action while keeping the authority at the minimum; instead of always discussing, they have to create an environment that inclines toward action while retaining the contemplation, handling objections, and discussions at a healthy level."

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95%-Ile Isn't That Good
8 minutes read.

"Despite all of the caveats above, my belief is that it's easier to become relatively good at real life activities relative to games or sports because there's so little delibrate practice put into most real life activities." -- Dan Luu will get you thinking of improving. Most activities are not zero-sum games in life, so feedback loops are more difficult to measure. This is an excellent suggestion for things you want to get better at: "My fix for that was to hire a professional editor whose writing I respected with the instructions - I don't care about spelling and grammar fixes, there are fundamental problems with my writing that I don't understand, please explain to me what they are." Small note: I recommend increasing the font size or reading the post with one of the "Read it Later" services (I use Instapaper).

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@linuz90: A principle to live by, for both design and code: What’s the simplest way to do this, which is also the simplest way to use this for the end user. Seems common sense but we overcomplicate by default

@lilykonings: The Senior IC path is probably the best thing that's happened to management. Forcing reluctant people into managerial roles has caused so much workplace trauma for everyone.