Software Lead Weekly

Teams, Trust, and Object Lessons (Audio)
28 minutes read.

Ben Horowitz (a16z) and Dick Costolo (Twitter's ex-CEO) with a great talk on leadership. They are both pretty remarkable and interesting individuals, so it is just fun to listen to them share stories and observations.

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When Your Back-End Dev Tries to Be a Full-Stack Developer...
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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The 10 Practices of Healthy Engineering Teams
5 minutes read.

This is the 3rd part of an essay by Andrew Hao, and it contains a lot of important practices. The practices of "They play well with the product team" and "Develop just enough architecture process" are key in order to scale without creating too many management bottlenecks.

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Why Recruiting Isn’t Over When an Employee Accepts Your Offer
5 minutes read.

I experienced before employees committing to join the team and bailing out on the last moment. Mark Suster with some good tips on how to reduce that risks (you can never really avoid it).

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Why Scaling Agile Doesn't Work (Video)
50 minutes read.

Jez Humble will make you think about the processes big Enterprises apply, and why it's so often the case that projects fail while using "iterative process" wrapped in good old Waterfall decision making.

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The Highest-Leverage Activities Aren’t Always Deep Work
4 minutes read.

"Believing that success rests solely on your technical laurels limits your career growth. Your ability to create meaningful impact in your job relies on other, less deep work as well." -- learning how to communicate and influence others in the organization requires a lot of time investment in areas that many individual contributors feel uncomfortable.

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Cognitive Biases in Engineering Organizations (Video)
30 minutes read.

Jonathan Klein (Etsy) with powerful cognitive biases we should be aware of when building software, and how to deal with them. Learning about our cognitive biases is a great way to at least create self-awareness, so when a situation occurs we can pull ourselves out of the "automatic response" and give it some extra thought. We should be able to say more often "I feel I'm reacting to the situation, and I'd like to think about it for a few more hours before making my final decision."

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The Psychological Benefits of Writing Regularly
4 minutes read.

I believe that people who strive to improve their leadership skills should try and write daily, practicing their ability to communicate ideas and how they build the story around it. This one is golden: "In both emotional intelligence and in hard sciences like mathematics, writing has been shown to help people communicate highly complex ideas more effectively. Writing helps eliminate “it sounded good in my head” by forcing your hand; brains forgive fuzzy abstractions, prose does not."

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@sehurlburt: Some of the most talented developers I know are either w smaller companies or independent, bc big co interviews can be so idiotic/painful.

@mrb_bk: What programming language your company uses is like what color underwear you wear on a date: only matters if you get lucky