Software Lead Weekly

This Week's Favorite

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Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without A Net
3 minutes read.

"Coding without a net" is actually the strangest title you can call this move by Yahoo. When organization stop relying on manual QA, and move towards test automation and building services that's responsible to fix gaps in data in real time, you can hardly call it working without a net. It's the exact opposite: it creates a culture where tests, monitoring, alerting and robustness are being considered and built-in with every feature, service and project, rather than a late bandage in the wrong place.

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Culture

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When Programming Languages Play Poker
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. Yes, it includes Star Wars reference.

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Sorry, But Your Start-up’s Team Isn’t Actually Any More Agile Than The Big Guys. Why You Really Still Can Win.
3 minutes read.

This post is a must read if you're part of a startup. Jason Lemkin writes it so well: "So don’t be cocky about your nimble dev team. That is deeply and perilously misguided. Be cocky instead about your 72 month commitment to your market. About being able to bring together engineers, product guys, a sales team, a marketing team, a client success team — all dedicated to your product and your market before it’s truly at scale."

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Innovation Vs. Execution
5 minutes read.

Two checklists that could help you look deeper into your organization and understand the type of company you've built, or the type of company you'd like to become. Some companies are great at both, but usually it comes with certain groups in the organization responsible for different parts while building trust and respect for each other's "unfair advantage". It requires leaders who can put aside ego, and never let people in their team disrespect other people in the organization for their style. It often fails because leaders fail to be the glue needed, blaming the other side on "being too slow and dogmatic" or "for recklessly delivering poor code to production".

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What The Hell Is Devops?
8 minutes read.

DevOps is an overused and overloaded term, and until now, most of the articles I read were so ridiculous in trying to explain it, until a friend sent me this post by Demir Selmanovic. Wonderful read about the culture of delivery a constant stream of value to your customers. Loved the "DevOps organization checklist" near the end.

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Peopleware

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Do The Right Thing
4 minutes read.

Cap Watkins with an inspirational read on being a thoughtful leader and do the right thing for your team: "If people know you’re always acting in their best interests (and not simply your own or the company’s), they’ll trust you and come along when you want to try something new. And if you admit when you’re wrong and try something else, they’ll trust you even more."

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Lessons Learned in Software Development
8 minutes read.

Henrik Warne shares great insights and lessons he picked up along the years, and I'm sure you'll enjoy, and learn from them too. Share it with other engineers in your company, there are so many gems in it I cannot even pick one or two to write here.

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Your Best Employees Will Leave You. Here’s What To Do About It.
5 minutes read.

I had this discussion at work a few days ago, about the importance of building a team and brand that will allow you to deal with the fact that employees will leave. The worst thing that could happen is not that someone leaves, because that could often happen regardless of what you did or what happened inside of the company. Some people want to do relocation, others wants a role that you cannot offer. The worst part is losing talent without building a powerful brand that will allow you to hire others just as good (even if different). Companies such as Google, Facebook, Stripe, Etsy, Spotify, Uber and others lost many employees along the years, but they also created a brand that helped them to hire others, and keep the quality of the team high.

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Inspiring Tweets

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@auxesis: Relentless focus on delivery can restrict opportunities to learn. Give people time to step back, reflect and learn

@james_clear: No one ever got rich checking their email more often.