Software Lead Weekly

This Week's Favorite

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Fail at Scale: Reliability in The Face of Rapid Change at Facebook
8 minutes read.

While this is mostly a technical post, understanding how human aspects are part of the system instead of layer on top of it truly helps to build robust products and companies. Planning a system where you can quickly figuring out that something wrong happened and deploying a fix for it (or revert to previous version), requires looking deeper into the entire cycle of development. Great insights from the team at Facebook on how you can build resilient software at scale, with a lot of emphasis on the human aspects behind it.

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Culture

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When I Stop Paying Attention to How Config Management is Running on my Servers
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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Meetings That Don’t Suck
6 minutes read.

This, so much this: "Your calendar doesn’t make you important: Too many executives think a busy calendar makes them seem important, and that being double- or triple-booked is their chest full of medals. You’re a manager, not a professional meeting attendee. It only makes you unavailable and out of touch with the needs of your team. If you’re not needed, decline the invitation or leave. And don’t take it personally if you’re not invited. Often, that’s a testament to the strength of the team you’ve built."

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How We Explain Stock Options to Team Members & How Much Money They Would Make
5 minutes read.

While I know it would take time for companies that start educating their employees on that subject - they fear of releasing information that might reduce their leverage during negotiation time - I know this will come bottom-up from employees. Buffer represents the kind of future I'd like to see where companies are actively educating their employees, rather than hoping they won't ask hard questions.

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This is What is Given to You When Your Project is Deprecated at Google
2 minutes read.

"Fail fast! MVP! Pivot!" -- We are all doing our very best to focus on the problem rather than the solutions, making it easier (never easy!) to experiment, learn and adjust as we go. How do you make sure failures won't become too traumatic for the team? Well, I'm not sure if this little statue by Google is the best idea, but it works for them. Learning to deal with failures by acknowledging them first and trying to learn as much as possible, is a virtue for a strong team. Adding some humor to it cannot hurt.

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Peopleware

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Things That Aren't Progress
2 minutes read.

Being busy is an addiction. You end your work feeling you managed to complete some things, some of them might even get some public exposure, but are you truly making any significant progress? Focus on what really matters to you and your team in order to win.

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How to Hire The Best People You've Ever Worked With
7 minutes read.

Old post by Marc Andreessen, but still highly relevant and great value for your time. The first thing I look for in candidates is their hunger to learn and master their craft, whatever it might be. I'm interested to learn why they did things in a certain way, and how many questions they asked when a specific decision was made by someone else in previous companies they worked for. Raw intelligence is important, but not suffice by itself for a great career. Also, check Marc's advice on how to test for ethics when interviewing, it's golden.

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Software Engineer Traits
2 minutes read.

This comes as a good addition to the previous post. Before reading it though, think of which traits would you consider absolutely necessary for great software engineers?

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Inspiring Tweets

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@chrisdesalvo: Saw Spectre. You could tell who the bad guy was because he had his ‘knowledge workers’ slaving away in an open seating plan.

@PicardTips: Picard management tip: If you're unhappy with a crew member's behavior, tell them straight out in private. Don't be passive aggressive.