Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Write Code Every Day
6 minutes read.

John Resig with a great post I highly recommend reading this week! What I enjoyed most about John's insights was his view on battling anxiety - His commitment for up to 30 minutes of coding every day, can really help fighting the feeling of defeat due to stagnation. A week without some progress on writing my book felt like a huge step backward to me. I've applied the daily routine and found it to be a great motivator. Small tip: if you have an iPhone, look for a helpful app called Commit (by Nathan Barry). I'll finish with John's words: "if you don’t care about improving yourself then you’ll never actually succeed"

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Move Until You See It
3 minutes read.

Tal Bereznitskey offers a great advice for all of the developers out there: Keep building. Don't overthink. Great post to share with engineers who join your company right out of school. One more advice I would "steal" from the Chess analogy Tal used, is to look at code written by others so you could see how others approach writing software (GitHub is a great place to find projects). It would never replace your need to practice, but it could inspire you to take different directions and try new approaches.

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Inspiring the Next Generation of Female Engineers (Video)
17 minutes read.

Amazing TED talk by Debbie Sterling, on her own journey of becoming an engineer. Her teacher, encouraging her to major in engineering or her friend who protected her after her professor made fun of her in public are really powerful stories, and a great mirror to our society. Debbie is a wonderful example for the huge benefit we will gain by having more female engineerings in our industry. You'll enjoy this video, I promise you that.

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Building Culture in a Remote Team (Slides)
5 minutes read.

Beautifully designed slides by the remote team of Sqwiggle. I loved their ideas for a reading-list group and paid gym membership with a place to share your progress. If you have a remote team or you're thinking of joining one, these slides are golden.

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So You Think You Want to Manage?
5 minutes read.

"Management is the practice of constantly identifying what a team needs in order to be successful and then delivering on those needs." - another great post by Julie Zhuo (the writer of The Manager's Manifesto I've shared a few months ago). The best advice I can give you is to read it and share it with your management team, it's packed with great insights.

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How to Manage Talented People by Not Bossing Them Around
6 minutes read.

Wonderful post by Walter Chen (CEO at iDoneThis), sharing 3 ways you can implement bosslessness principles at your company. If you want to create a culture where everyone is also a "mini-manager", you have to set clear expectations. We have to understand that most of us never worked at companies where the employees pick their own work, promoting their suggestions and follow through with execution, marketing and business. To build such culture we need to explicitly explain why we believe in such value, hire people who will prosper because of it and then let them run.

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Why Making My Tasks Emotional Increased My Productivity
5 minutes read.

Probably one of the best productivity tricks I've seen for a while, and something I'm planning to start utilize at work. I know exactly where I'm going to put my task of "write my weekly email to SoftwareLeadWeekly list". Robyn Scott says it best: "Our belief that we’re not easily influenced has been fabulously debunked by the extraordinary studies showing how, when prompted with words that suggest states of being, we act accordingly. Show people words related to old age and they walk more slowly etc."

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@sama: high-leverage piece of business advice: write short emails.

@EinsteinQuots: I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.