Software Lead Weekly
Issue #227, 31st March 2017
This Week's Favorite
Complexity and Strategy
14 minutes read.
Terry Crowley, the technical lead of Micrsoft's Office for the past 10 years, with a great in-depth view into the complexity, technical considerations and estimations working on multiple projects with a huge user base, and a lot of competitors like Google Apps. This is a powerful observation: "If the product starts to grow complex — and you can predict that fairly directly by looking at the size of the development team — then costs will come to be dominated by that increasing feature interaction and essential complexity."
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
14 minutes read.
Terry Crowley, the technical lead of Micrsoft's Office for the past 10 years, with a great in-depth view into the complexity, technical considerations and estimations working on multiple projects with a huge user base, and a lot of competitors like Google Apps. This is a powerful observation: "If the product starts to grow complex — and you can predict that fairly directly by looking at the size of the development team — then costs will come to be dominated by that increasing feature interaction and essential complexity."
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Culture
Real Life Hungry-Hungry Hippo!
1 minutes read.
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. Need to play it in our next Happy Hour at work.
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
1 minutes read.
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. Need to play it in our next Happy Hour at work.
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
The MVP Is Dead. Long Live the RAT.
4 minutes read.
״Dedicated engineers, designers and product managers can be their own worst enemy. Their professionalism pulling them towards perfected products. Leading to feature creep and polished code. But if no one needs your product then no one cares if it’s beautiful and has impeccable code quality.״ -- Using Riskiest Assumption Tests to try and answer critical questions is a great method I'm applying now at work as we're working on a few new directions, and it's hard to understand the value versus investment witout it. The distinction can feel subtle, but it's actually much better way to build initial versions of a product.
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
4 minutes read.
״Dedicated engineers, designers and product managers can be their own worst enemy. Their professionalism pulling them towards perfected products. Leading to feature creep and polished code. But if no one needs your product then no one cares if it’s beautiful and has impeccable code quality.״ -- Using Riskiest Assumption Tests to try and answer critical questions is a great method I'm applying now at work as we're working on a few new directions, and it's hard to understand the value versus investment witout it. The distinction can feel subtle, but it's actually much better way to build initial versions of a product.
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Here Are the 13 Books I Recommend to Everyone on My Team
4 minutes read.
Great list of books to hand out to new employees by David Cancel (Drift's CEO). I think it can be a great way to make a memorable day for a new hire, by letting people to give them the 3 books "that made the most impact on their career".
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
4 minutes read.
Great list of books to hand out to new employees by David Cancel (Drift's CEO). I think it can be a great way to make a memorable day for a new hire, by letting people to give them the 3 books "that made the most impact on their career".
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Case Study: How Complexity Creeps In
5 minutes read.
One of the most important posts to read if you're into building products or thinking of becoming an entrepreneur at some point. Jason Fried's rules of thumb should be printed and hang above your screen, as these are exactly the quetions you need to ask yourself if you're taking the right path in terms of culture (what you're trying to improve in the world) and the investment that will be required to take you there.
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
5 minutes read.
One of the most important posts to read if you're into building products or thinking of becoming an entrepreneur at some point. Jason Fried's rules of thumb should be printed and hang above your screen, as these are exactly the quetions you need to ask yourself if you're taking the right path in terms of culture (what you're trying to improve in the world) and the investment that will be required to take you there.
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Peopleware
Running a Manager Feedback Cycle
5 minutes read.
Bookmark this post as I'm sure you'll come back to it many times in your career. You should "steal" Cate Huston's questions & process and try it out in your company for your managers. This is something I'd like to do for the Engineering Managers I lead, as I'm sure they'd love to get such feedback from their teammates and peers.
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
5 minutes read.
Bookmark this post as I'm sure you'll come back to it many times in your career. You should "steal" Cate Huston's questions & process and try it out in your company for your managers. This is something I'd like to do for the Engineering Managers I lead, as I'm sure they'd love to get such feedback from their teammates and peers.
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
The New Road to the Six
15 minutes read.
“The D-League is the only time people in our industry talk like startups,” says 87ers GM Williams. “You can make mistakes and it’s OK. You won’t get fired. It’s wide open to learn.” -- I'm a huge basketball fan (played most of my childhood), so this article about Jerry Stackhouse's decision to take the "hard path" and work from the bottom up to lead a NBA team evenutally was really interesting. Like Jerry, I'm a true believer in developing your skills before making an unreasonable jump in your career. This is something I've learned early on as a player, spending hours every day dribbling the ball, practicing easy shots, before learning and executing complex game plays or guiding my teammates.
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
15 minutes read.
“The D-League is the only time people in our industry talk like startups,” says 87ers GM Williams. “You can make mistakes and it’s OK. You won’t get fired. It’s wide open to learn.” -- I'm a huge basketball fan (played most of my childhood), so this article about Jerry Stackhouse's decision to take the "hard path" and work from the bottom up to lead a NBA team evenutally was really interesting. Like Jerry, I'm a true believer in developing your skills before making an unreasonable jump in your career. This is something I've learned early on as a player, spending hours every day dribbling the ball, practicing easy shots, before learning and executing complex game plays or guiding my teammates.
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
I Built A Bot to Apply to Thousands of Jobs at Once – Here’s What I Learned
5 minutes read.
The biggest takeaway from this fun article is how important it is to build some network around you of people you love talking with. More importantly, help your teammates build their networks. Yes, you might lose some of them, but you will gain a lot more by helping them. Leading from a place of growth will create more opportunities for you to hire or be hired in the future.
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
5 minutes read.
The biggest takeaway from this fun article is how important it is to build some network around you of people you love talking with. More importantly, help your teammates build their networks. Yes, you might lose some of them, but you will gain a lot more by helping them. Leading from a place of growth will create more opportunities for you to hire or be hired in the future.
Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Inspiring Tweets
@kartar: Knowing my luck when we begin to upload consciousness to the Cloud, I’ll end up in us-east-1.
- Oren
P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.
P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.