Software Lead Weekly

How Do Managers (Or Senior ICs) Get Stuck?
5 minutes read.

Camille Fournier explains the various reasons why you can get stuck, poorly managing down, sideways or up. This is a must read if you care about your career or if you want to explain to others why their stuck in theirs.

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My Code Headed to Prod
1 minutes read.

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

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Renovating Teams
7 minutes read.

Use this post from Ranganathan Balashanmugam to diagnose teams who don't work well together. Helpful framework to figure out the depth of the problem and possible solutions to handle with it.

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Incident Management and the Incident Complexity Framework (Video)
24 minutes read.

Curt Micol covers a lot of good practices for the way you can deal with incidents. One of those talks every manager should watch if they care about the health of the team, assuming these teams are included in the on-call rotation.

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Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
5 minutes read.

What are you looking to do (or try) in your career? What are your teammates looking to do? Good topic for 1:1s to help people understand how they can grow in their career, the pros & cons you can discuss and the strategies to get there.

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Optimizing for Iteration Speed
4 minutes read.

Optimizing for quick learning cycles (deployment of code to production is just a phase) is key for allowing your company more swings to earn points. Erik Bernhardsson thoughts on "Small tasks" and "Cross-functional people and teams" are spot on, mostly this statement which I highly agree with: "Feature flagging is a last option, and we use it sparingly. Even worse, is having feature branches. They are devil’s work and should be abolished. Git-flow is a terrible invention and when we tried it at Spotify, people spent something like 50% of their time just rebasing code."

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The Biggest Boost for My Career the Past Five Years Wasn't Working at Facebook or Being a Manager, It Was Developing Public Speaking Skills. (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Another golden tweetstorm from Charity Majors‏. Public speaking is one of the best ways I found to share my thoughts and get feedback while looking at how people move in their chair and react to stories and takeaways I shared. It's personal (thus scary) and immediate: "I got straight up better at tech when I started having to explain to large crowds of people, to craft a narrative+slides that made sense"

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Interviewing Engineers at Sensu
5 minutes read.

I love reading how different companies interview engineers as you can always takeaway a few practices to improve your own process: "Having a numeric grading system with clear descriptions for each grade allows us to rank candidates and understand where their expertise fits with regard to our team."

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@shanselman: If you're starting a sentence with "Why don't you just..." then it's very likely you don't understand the complexity of the problem.

@jaykreps: I swear product announcements in the big data space sometimes read like the output of a Markov random generator trained on big data fluff.