Software Lead Weekly

Pushing Through Friction (Video)
35 minutes read.

Dan Na with one of my favorite talks this year. Understanding that friction is a function of progress in learning not to shy away from it is critical to your culture. This insight might feel trivial but hard to follow when friction is high, and you cannot prove a decision "correct": "Being afraid of the optics of a hard but correct decision is the worst reason not to make that decision."

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Code Comments
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time. It's funny only because it's true.

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Structure Eats Strategy
3 minutes read.

We all need to read Jan Bosch's post at least once every 6-12 months or so when considering the org structure: "The interesting situation is that most companies are not BAPO (Business->Architecture->Process->Organization) but instead they are OPAB: the existing organization is used as a basis for the definition of convenience-driven processes, which in turn leads to an accidental architecture. This restrictive architecture, driven by the past of the company, rather than its future, then offers a highly limited set of business strategy options. [...] Start from the B; not the O!" -- You will always have some sense that the org structure is a mess. It's okay, like everything you do with high complexity - it's all tradeoffs. But learning to start with the Business (product and go to market) and moving to your high-level Architecture needs can at least provide you the reassurance you made the right assumptions.

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Tobi Lutke, Shopify's CEO: Once or Twice a Week, I Drop This Legendary Gif Into a Slack Chat to Make a Point About Latency. Usually When Talking About UX, Network Services, or Feedback Cycle Time in People Systems.
3 minutes read.

Treating your system latency as part of your core UX should be table stakes. It's not. That can be a significant advantage of your product. It's great to see Shopify's CEO sharing this importance. Is it something your company can improve? Is awareness there?

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Operations Is Not Developer IT
8 minutes read.

Mathew Duggan shares his frustration from owning (or at least the need to understand) more and more pieces of the stack. Once app developers started building distributed systems and dealing with “big data” - which is becoming common today - it’s hard to hide the complexity or focus on the “business logic” only as it was 15y ago. Our app’s logic became aware of the environment the code is running at because it impacts the business logic. Leaky abstraction is almost as unavoidable as bugs in production. I think that the massive adoption of “microservices all the things!” made things worse in that regard, as people learned a concept without understanding when and where this concept is powerful and net positive. They shifted the complexity one layer up and increased it by one order of magnitude. Investing in our engineers the time (practice) and education (books/workshops/etc.) has to be part of the business incentives. We should own and accept it, sparing time when people estimate efforts and when we estimate the budget for L&D.

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The Power of Framing a Problem
3 minutes read.

"Tell a good story, and you can make things happen. It’s a skill that’s worth getting better at." -- Lorin Hochstein with a post that leaders need to read. It's easier to influence others when you understand the pains and speak in your customers' language.

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Last Week I Sat for an Internal Interview About My Career Progression to High Level IC Engineer, With a Focus on How I've Never Felt I Needed to Become a Manager to Gain Influence. I Thought I Would Share Some of My Career Advice for Aspiring IC "Lifers." (Thread)
3 minutes read.

Matt Klein wrote a thread packed with gems. I highly recommend to Individual Contributors (IC) to read and share with others. The "depth" vs. "breadth" influence is a good observation to figure the type of career and skills you seek to work on. This one is golden: "One last thing: don't let anyone tell you that the tech/engineering is the easy part. It's not. It's hard. Soft skills are also hard. It's ALL hard, and both are required to succeed."

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The Art of Not Taking Things Personally
5 minutes read.

Dave Bailey wrote a post that made me think of how to deal with friction and build better relationships. It's helpful to take a step back and understand the other side. It helps to ask a few questions about the relationship and how we work together before dealing with the actual dilemma.

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@norootcause: Building shared understanding is some of the most undervalued work in software development.

@dberkholz: Just heard: "The feedback loop is broken by inventory." While this is from operations management, it's worth thinking about for software development -- things like code review, user stories, etc. Building up "inventory" means delayed feedback on work quality and more waste.