Software Lead Weekly

This Week's Favorite

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Game Day Exercises at Stripe: Learning From `kill -9`
6 minutes read.

Game Day is definitely a concept you should try at your company. Not only it encourages people to work with other people they normally wouldn't, it's a great opportunity to create an environment for people to learn from one another, and have some fun without the pressure of immediate deadlines. What do you think? Worth trying to arrange a Game Day at your company?

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Culture

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The New Official #devops Greeting
1 minute read.

As always, something to start the weekend with a huge smile on your face. Share with geeks.

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Fewer Bosses. More Coaches. Please.
4 minutes read.

Short and to the point. Wonderful read by Paul Gonzalez. We owe our teammates better than a "load balancer" type of managers, people who believe their job is to assign tasks and monitor the execution of their teammates. Leadership requires deep empathy. Today, even more than ever, we need more coaches in our industry. Trying to scale an organization without a solid foundation can only lead to short term wins.

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How Google Works (Slides by Eric Schmidt)
5 minutes read.

Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg share their insights on how Google operates as a company and business. Two interesting ideas I took from it: "Plan your culture early. Think about (and document) the things you care about as a group, the way you work and make decisions" and "Remeber big bets can sometimes be easier to achieve than small ones"

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A Counterintuitive System For Startup Compensation
15 minutes read.

Golden rule: "No one is ever happy with compensation, and compensation has never made anyone happy". Striving for clear compensation formula is probably one of the best advices one could apply. Bookmark this one if you're in a position that requires to come up with offers to candidates.

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Peopleware

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Owning It
7 minutes read.

"Leadership means owning a problem" says Julie Zhuo. She shares 9 yes/no statements that would help you to figure out if you're currently acting as a leader. While all of them are incredibly useful, my favorite is - "You approach solving X with a sense of urgency" - sense of urgency is a great multiplier to build strong momentum.

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A Value System For Code Reviews, And How to Scale Them For A Large Project
4 minutes read.

Roy Osherove with a great advice on how to figure out your basic values for effective Code Reviews, so it would be possible to share the load without being dependent on a single person in the team. Scalable processes are key to allow hyper growth of a team (goes hand in hand when the product reach product-market fit). Whether or not you find the values offered good match for your needs, the act of figuring them for your team is invaluable. Share it internally and have a discussion.

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Don’t Fight Distraction. Make It Irrelevant.
3 minutes read.

"Distraction, from this perspective, is not the cause of problems in your work life, it’s a side effect... Are you striving to do something useful and do it so well that you cannot be ignored?" - nothing to add really, worth every minute of your time to read this post by Cal Newport.

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Inspiring Tweets

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@dorkitude: An entrepreneur is a machine for turning doubt into hope.

@rands: Management is not a reward.