Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Making Operational Work More Visible
5 minutes read.

Many companies, like Netflix, adopted the "you build it, you run it" mindset. In addition to the teams' running their ops, they have a CORE team responsible for the "glue" work: tools, learning from all failures, running Incidents Retrospective meetings, etc. Adopting the "This week in operations" in your team can be a nice approach to put in the front something that sometimes doesn't get the credit it deserves.

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Printing Physical Tickets for My GitHub Repos Issues
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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Motivating Developers to Care About Documentation
5 minutes read.

"Treat documentation like a discipline. Just as much as you incentivize shipping code you need to incentivize good documentation. That means the ability to write documentation is considered in the hiring and promotion processes." -- Paulo André shares his insights, setting a culture that promotes documentation to (in his words): "1. making better decisions across the organization, 2. helping people get the right information when they need it, and 3. making our onboarding process more self-service (my opinion is that onboarding should be 80% self-serve)."

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This Is What Happens When There Are Too Many Meetings
5 minutes read.

"People have 250 percent more meetings every day than they did before the pandemic. [...] That means everything else—like coding and email and writing—is being pushed later." -- the flexibility of WFH meets with the fact most people are finding it challenging to manage their time (and energy) even before the pandemic. Figuring out the boundaries teams should have to protect their focus time while teaching people tools and practices to improve how to create focus time will become more critical than ever.

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Building Infrastructure Platforms
14 minutes read.

"So when thinking about infrastructure platforms, we like to think about the Shortest Path to Value (SPV) as the time when we want our first users to onboard. Shortest Path to Value is as it sounds, what is the soonest you can get value, either for your team, your users, your organisation or a mixture. We like the SPV approach as it helps you continuously think about when the earliest opportunity to learn is there and push for a thinner slice." -- Poppy Rowse and Chris Shepherd with a post you should share internally if you have infrastructure teams building tools to improve the velocity of your development teams.

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Interview With Shawn Wang: The Intersection of Developer Experience and Infrastructure
9 minutes read.

"I think most Infra Engineers could do with more developer empathy, which in most situations simply means putting themselves in the shoes of people with less context and knowledge than them and proactively helping them out by any means necessary. If you do it right, then yes, the developer experience of your users will be better because you took the effort, but it should be done not for altruistic "let’s make them happy" reasons, but rather, selfish ones: your efforts will be more successful if they feel more successful." -- Great conversation with Shawn Wang, a wonderful thinker on this area of DX and Infra.

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11 Harsh Truths That Changed My Life and May Change Yours (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Sahil Bloom (worth following if you're on Twitter) wrote an excellent thread that made me think a lot about my experience in life so far. My favorite: "Harsh Truth: There's no such thing as a hack. Everyone wants the hacks or shortcuts, but there’s literally no such thing. If anyone tries to sell you one, you should run away as fast as you can. The only hack is painful, relentless consistency. It’s not sexy, but it works." -- hence this email, on Passover night, in your inbox. 490 weeks of consistency because there is no hack.

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The Transmogrifying Power of Reflection
3 minutes read.

"Reflection can transmogrify the negative into positive. Conflict can become opportunity, confusion can yield to insight. " -- CJ Cenizal shares how he reflects on the "self" and the "situation" when analyzing his day. Trying to average out the ups & downs during the day and week is critical to remain positive and focus on the impact you want to make.

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@SebAaltonen: Software should be composable. Framework-style libraries aren't proper libraries. You can't use multiple of them at the same time. Please design proper composable libraries instead.

@gdb: Software engineering: 50% understanding requirements, 40% complexity management, 9% debugging, 1% solving "interesting" algorithmic problems. You'll enjoy software engineering a whole lot more if you instead think of the first 99% as the interesting part.