Software Lead Weekly

Exploring the Human Implications of Conway’s Law
4 minutes read.

"While preemptively controlling for every aspect of the communication between the humans designing a system seems unlikely, it stands to reason that optimizing for the well-being of the individuals doing the work can be a sort of resilience engineering... If Conway’s Law is right, maintenance on the state of the human nodes in a network paves the way for more constructive communication patterns, and better software" -- This is such a powerful observation by Ana Noemi. Are we doing enough to optimize our organizational communication by taking care of our humans? After all, software is made by humans :)

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Matching My Nails to My Newly Finished Build Is the Most on Brand Thing I've Ever Done in My Life
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face: this time not because it's funny but rather this is really impressive work on both sides!

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Atlassian Boosted Its Female Technical Hires by 80% — Here’s How
13 minutes read.

I took many ideas from Aubrey Blanche, and this advice made me stop what I'm doing and write how we can change our hiring strategy: "To be more inclusive, send out an agenda a day in advance." -- This can help you crystallize what's really important (skills, expertise, behaviors), reduce pressure on the candidate and explicitly share what's not relevant for the job - they don't have to be perfect, you do hire for the potential as well.

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Just a Reminder: Most Corporate Agile Isn’t Iterative. It’s Incremental Delivery. (Thread)
3 minutes read.

"As long as PMs are focussed on delivering features on a backlog. And as long as teams are focussed on velocity. True iteration won’t get a look in." -- We so often adopt practices just to say we "do Agile" or "are Agile." I think that Zach McArtor comment is so spot on. Adopt and iterate on what you understand, not what the industry claims as best practices and you know nothing about.

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Moving to Three-Person Engineering Teams
4 minutes read.

Phil Sarin shares their organizational transition, having many teams of three. There are many good up-sides to this structure (as Phil shares), and some possible shortcomings such as many local-maxima oriented teams, manage dependencies between so many teams (even if they strive for autonomous teams) etc. Like always, try to open your mind and think of which kind of companies (concerning size, challenges and team maturity) would benefit from it.

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A Thread of My Favorite Quotes From “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work” Book
3 minutes read.

Karen Cohen with quotes you'll enjoy reading from Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson's latest book. I tried to pick one or two, but all of them are so well written that it's impossible.

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Developers as a Malware Distribution Vehicle (Video)
39 minutes read.

Guy Podjarny with a talk I recommend watching with your teammates. Having security as a first-class citizen is no longer a nice to have "feature". Awareness is on the rise, and we should all do better job to protect our customers and users' data.

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Why We Are Never Truly Satisfied
6 minutes read.

I had a lot of time to read on the plane this week, and this post stroke a chord with me as I struggle to balance between being present and accomplishing long-term goals. I don't think we can be either 100% present here and now, or 100% in the future. We need to allow both mindsets to exists, maybe at different times, so others around us won't have to sacrifice their here and now because of us.

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@benedictevans: A startup is an idea, and then it’s an machine for making the idea and a machine for getting people to use the idea. A huge amount of what people mean by ‘a great entrepreneur’ comes in 2 and 3. Especially 3.

@vboykis: Being a developer is like constantly being in a video game where you go through arcane quests to get to the next level to fight a harder boss, except you're both the hero and the boss.