Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Find the Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It on Nights and Weekends for the Rest of Your Life
5 minutes read.

I just love this post. Hearing talks about work/life balance always felt strange to me as I thought that work is part of life, and I am lucky enough to get paid for what I really enjoy doing. What is there to balance? It wasn't until last year when I seriously started to work on my book and this weekly email as side-projects that I realized - I enjoy building *many* things and see how people react to them. While work is great, it cannot replace my enjoyment of writing or giving a talk about culture or technology. I follow this advice every day, making sure I address every passion of mine and goal I set to myself.

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Pairing vs. Code Review: Comparing Developer Cultures
10 minutes read.

Wonderful insights from Paul Hinze on two different development cultures. The pros and cons Paul is raising is a great eye-opening to the value and cost of each practice - share it with your engineers and spend some quality time with them, figuring out which kind of ideas and practices you believe would work for you.

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Facebook’s Release Process Behind the Move From Web-Based to Native App
3 minutes read.

I believe that this post is probably just 1% of the entire story, but there are a few interesting observations in it, so I recommend to also watch the video. I've got an hypnosis that Continuous Deployment in the mobile world is just matter of time. Gate-keepers such as Apple and Google provide little value testing well-known apps such as Facebook's. I would assume that companies such as Facebook will get a special approval to release without manual approval from the gate-keepers side. We cannot allow ourselves to kill innovation by slowing down release cycles on purpose. We've been there before.

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Evolving QA to Continuous Deployment
5 minutes read.

If you ever considered how the traditional role of QA should transform to fit a new world of Continuous Deployment, this post by Omri Lapidot is just for you. In our industry, the ability to change and find new vision and goals is both the scary and interesting part of our job. While each company finds its own balance and declares the needs from QA, it's fascinating to hear how they deal with a new reality so openly. How do you see QA in your company? How did it change (if at all) in the past 5 years? How do you see it evolving in the next 5 years?

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Twitter SVP Chris Fry Breaks Down How His Engineering Org Works
7 minutes read.

I really enjoy reading how companies approach scaling their engineering organization. Understanding Twitter's priorities and how they envision their next steps can teach us a lot about their pains and evolution as a company - "So the goal was to maintain a lot of the autonomy of the individual teams, but to put a structure in place that allowed everyone to work together seamlessly."

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Performance Is Nurtured, Not Measured
4 minutes read.

If you care about your employees' performance, this post by Elias Torres (VP Engineering at HubSpot) is simply a must read. Our role as leaders is to remember that output is only a single parameter in individuals' performance. It's crucial, but by itself it is never enough. In order to build an amazing engineering organization (rather than an open-source pet project), we need to figure out how people jell together. Having meaningful 1:1 with our teammates, spending time figuring out our hiring and firing processes are our responsibility. Delaying it to "get some more work done" is understandable, but the long-term culture damage can become irreversible.

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The Ideas That Shaped Management in 2013
7 minutes read.

As you know, the goal of this email is to save you the trouble of finding great content, by doing the curation work myself. Having said that, there are so many interesting articles in this post, that I thought you'll enjoy picking the best ones for 2013. Happy 2014 everyone!

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@auren: "To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing." - Aristotle

@LifeHacks: Listen to the advice of older people. Not because they're right, but because they have the most experience being wrong