Software Lead Weekly

The Null Process
7 minutes read.

Beautifully written post by Kate Heddleston: "Our fear of "unnecessary process" has created workplaces with something worse than bad process: no process. I call these types of processes "null processes," and they are rampant at startups and technology companies." -- share it with your team, and see if there are areas where process is being avoided for the wrong reasons.

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Should We Use a URL Shortener?
1 minutes read.

This one will put a huge smile on your face. "Should we use a URL shortener?" - "No, we don't have time. Just use the link I gave you and send it!!"

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An Open Letter to Tony Hsieh
7 minutes read.

After the huge turnover in Zappos due to their “get on board with holacracy now or leave” memo, it's interesting to read and ponder on this move by Tony Hsieh (Zappos's CEO) and how it will turn out. This post by Daniel Tenner has a balanced view, with very concrete and constructive feedback. Also, it's packed with all the relevant links, if you want to read more about the transition Zappos is going through. Interesting read.

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Hacking Company Culture
6 minutes read.

Pedram Keyani helped organizing over 40 Hackathons while working at Facebook, and shares why and how you can take advantage of the format. My favorite takeaways were "Risk Everything, Win Together" and "Code Wins Arguments". It's amazing to see how much can be done in a day or two of hacking together something people want to play with.

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Leadership, Mentoring and Team Chemistry, the Soft Skills Needed for DevOps
5 minutes read.

"But the short of it is you can’t have a team that performs at that level without having them do the work, responding to outages, and training together. That last bit is something that’s sorely missed in many operations teams." -- this is still a struggle to get right. Are we setting the expectation with our Senior Engineers to help spread the knowledge and spare time for training their teammates?

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Letting Go as a Manager
4 minutes read.

Cap Watkins (from BuzzFeed) shares his struggle of letting go when leading a team of designers. One paragraph really stroke a chord with me: "There are much, much better designers than you out there... I consider myself lucky in that, not having a formal design education, I kind of always knew this one. And lucky for you, most designers have imposter syndrome, so you probably suspect this as well. " -- this feeling is, I believe, something most of us feel. That's a good thing actually, we just need to have the courage to inspire them to join us, and letting go so we could see them shine.

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How I Prepare Conference Talks
6 minutes read.

You should bookmark this post and use it whenever you're planning to give a talk, may it be inside of your company or at some conference. Just try to be authentic and always talk about a topic you're truly passionate about currently. It really shows.

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@ryangraves: “A comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there.”

@klamping: don't measure productivity by how many hours you've worked, it's a fools game.