Software Lead Weekly

Enabling Environment
5 minutes read.

I'm a huge fan of Andy Matuschak's work. Notice the small framework he made to capture notes and explore them within the same context (try clicking on links). I found myself exploring different areas and reading for an hour, considering how Enabling Environment looks like at work and the way I consume content: "In a good Enabling environment like a strong corporation or Minecraft, the activities mostly comprise doing what those environments enable. By contrast, most books (even executable books) don’t involve doing what they’re about. These environments’ activities are about what they’re about—reading about basketball, not playing basketball. They’re at a remove from the action, and that makes them less able to enable their participants."

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Open Source Dev Support in One Image
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. Stars are overrated, sponsorship is underrated.

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Production Oriented Development
9 minutes read.

Paul Osman covers the direction more and more companies are heading towards. Pay extra attention to the paragraph "Trust the People Closest to the Knives." and discuss the 9 points internally as I'm sure it will lead to a heated and important debate. Once you reach a certain scale, there is no way around it, and as Paul writes: "Non-Production environments have diminishing returns."

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Team Objectives – Overview
6 minutes read.

Marty Cagan made me think a lot about the usage of OKRs I've seen in companies I worked for, and discussions I had with others: "when working with their cross-functional colleagues in a product team – are all working on their own objectives, rather than working collaboratively on the team objectives." -- worth reading Marty's older posts about Product vs. Feature Teams.

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Some of My Favorite Takeaways & Quotes From Keith Rabois Interviews (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Erik Torenberg with many insights from Keith Rabois that you can learn from. My favorites: "When you need upside, hire aptitude. When protecting against the downside, hire experience. When you’re trying to create something from scratch, experience is often a handicap." and "How to identify stars? Notice who people in the company go to talk to that they don’t have to."

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Building Bridges as a Technical Leader
7 minutes read.

Keavy McMinn is such a wonderful example of how senior engineers should act and lead. When you try to impact more teams and groups, there is no way around the conflicts (or politics) that comes with it. Learning how to tell good stories, getting the buy-in (from the right people,) and asking for advice (or sponsorship) are all skills we should improve if we want to increase our impact.

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Welcome to Your 1:1s Repo
3 minutes read.

I love this idea by Sophie Shepherd with a template for a weekly 1:1 repo, including GitHub Action, to trigger a set of questions plus letting you capture your notes via Pull Request.

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@brianmwang: The best measure of a leader is how much responsibility they take for their team's failures.

@Julian: Writing is thinking on paper. Becoming a better writer makes you a better all-around thinker. You learn to communicate more clearly and persuasively. The world's top minds became brilliant *through* the habit of writing. Writing is how you too can realize your potential.