Software Lead Weekly

This Week's Favorite

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

Time investment: 8 minutes, add to: Pocket, Instapaper.
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Culture

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When I Stop Paying Attention to How Config Management is Running on my Servers
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

Time investment: 1 minute, add to: Pocket, Instapaper.
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Meetings That Don’t Suck
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."

Time investment: 6 minutes, add to: Pocket, Instapaper.
Inspire others: share it via twitter or email.


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

Time investment: 5 minutes, add to: Pocket, Instapaper.
Inspire others: share it via twitter or email.


This is What is Given to You When Your Project is Deprecated at Google
"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.

Time investment: 2 minutes, add to: Pocket, Instapaper.
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Peopleware

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Things That Aren't Progress
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.

Time investment: 2 minutes, add to: Pocket, Instapaper.
Inspire others: share it via twitter or email.


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

Time investment: 7 minutes, add to: Pocket, Instapaper.
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Software Engineer Traits
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?

Time investment: 2 minutes, add to: Pocket, Instapaper.
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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.