Software Lead Weekly

This Week's Favorite

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Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned About Management
8 minutes read.

Julie Zhuo is an incredible writer and highly inspirational leader. Instead of quoting almost the entire post, take the time and read it. If you're a manager or thinking of becoming one, this is a must read. But I had to highlight something I believe is crucial to understanding leadership in a single paragraph: "In the long run, however, there is no getting around the fact that the best people don’t stay years and years to work under somebody they don’t respect or who doesn’t truly care about helping them or their teammates succeed."

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Culture

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Voltron: Teaching Kids Distributed Computing Since 1984
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. If you're a nerd and write distributed systems, you'll have a good laugh. Bonus point for sharing it at the office!

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Tobi Lütke of Shopify: Powering A Team With A ‘trust Battery’
5 minutes read.

This insight by Tobi (CEO at Shopify) is spot on, and extremely powerful: "It took me years to realize that a day where I met with investors and spoke at a conference was actually not a wasted day. Intellectually I knew this, but internally it just didn’t feel like it. I had to systematically rebuild how I measured my own contribution. Once I did that, I started realizing that it’s the team that matters, and that the best way for me to spend any given day is to essentially figure out how to make my team a tiny bit better... Trying to build a company that I’m going to be less embarrassed about in 50 years than all my peers is a great motivator for me."

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Implementers, Solvers, And Finders
7 minutes read.

Randall Koutnik with a post that I'd to send to every Engineering Manager and Technical Lead. This vocabulary provides a good understanding of the different stages both employees and companies share as they grow, keeping in mind that "People want to make decisions rather than execute them".

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The Asana Engineering Interview Guide
5 minutes read.

This is exactly how I believe you should approach hiring: a lot of honesty and visibility. The one thing you don't want to happen after someone joins the team is for them or you to be surprised.

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Peopleware

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System Design Cheatsheet For Software Engineers
6 minutes read.

Use this cheatsheet for your next Design Review with your team. It contains many of the right questions you should address when suggesting an architecture to solve a problem. Might be a good practice to create your own System Design cheatsheet, based on this work and your own experience.

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The Scaling CTO - You're Moving Faster But Course Correcting is Inefficient (Video)
19 minutes read.

On Freund (VP Engineering at WeWork) offers great observations on how to keep execution speed high as the company grows. Make sure to check "The MVC Team" and "The Infrastructure Team" as it's great examples for how organizational structure can explain the pains you have, and how you can cope with it moving forward.

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When to Rewrite From Scratch - Autopsy of A Failed Software
8 minutes read.

This post is a powerful reminder of how much software is a people problem first and foremost: "We convinced the entire organization and the board and sadly, we got our wish." -- Please read this and share with your people. Companies and teams have to learn how to make incremental changes, even if it feels that it would take longer to get right. It never is. Going for a rewrite often means that we give the same weight to all of the components in the system, which is never the case.

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Inspiring Tweets

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@tenderlove: I should start a sports equipment startup so that I can see hockey stick growth.

@fox: Trust is the base of all human relationships. If mutual trust doesn’t exist it’s either a bad hire or an organisational flaw.