Software Lead Weekly

6 secrets for successful small teams
Hugh Williams (one of eBay's finest leaders) shares his priceless tips about leading successful small teams "If you get your small team leadership right, your small team can change the world — and small teams do regularly change the world.".

Growing developers: Ask for solutions instead of giving them
Great posts are always relevant and Roy Osherove's one is golden. It's even more relevant to the technical leaders among you - "If a developer comes to you asking about what a specific API of the application infrastructure might look like - don't follow your initial feeling. Don't give them your idea of what a good API for that part of the app might look like."

Hire For The Ability To Get Shit Done
Elad Gil (Twitter) shares his awesome tips about hiring. Even though the context is around hiring in the startups world, these tips apply to every great company that tries to hire new blood. Read this post before you're next interview, it will put you in the right state-of-mind. Guaranteed! "Do they spend the time to become good at anything they adopt as a hobby? Larry and Sergey at Google would famously ask about people's random hobbies to test whether they were the type of people who focused on excellence and depth of understanding."

7 Zero-order measurements for agile projects
Markus Gärtner raises the right questions to ask if you want to understand how solid (or broken) your agile projects are. Try to use these questions in the context of your organization...

My First Real Clash with Mythical Man-Month
Aviv Ben-Yosef (BillGuard) shares his experience, as an engineer, with trying to keep the deadline by adding more people to the project. Great food for thought. "... the Mythical Man-Month is a book that talks about software projects managements and how our estimations are usually not really what we think they are. The one-line example that gets the point across clearly is “9 women can’t deliver a baby in 1 month”."

@ourfounder's tweet: Better moods = better performance. Hostile or even boring working environments are not sustainable. Poor work product and attrition result.

@KnowledgeBishop's tweet: Trust isn't incremental: It's EXPONENTIAL! #leadfromwithin