Software Lead Weekly

Life Is Not Short
4 minutes read.

This week was hard for me. This post served as a good reminder of how to look at life and apply a high-agency mindset. I tend to ensure a strong baseline - I'm healthy, have people I love, invest time in areas that matter to me, and enjoy doing my work. It will influence how I plan the decade, year, quarter, and day. I will set my schedule to work for me. I care for my emotional and physical baseline. Dreams are good targets, but we cannot travel far with a stone in our shoes.

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When You Mention JavaScript on Tech Twitter
1 minutes read.

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

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How to Build and Scale a Staff+ Engineering Community
5 minutes read.

"Staff and principal engineering roles may feel in-vogue and prestigious, but in practice, they’re often lonely and ill-defined." -- building a community within your organization to get Staff+ individual contributors to feel less lonely is essential. Scott Triglia's post might inspire you to see it happens in your company.

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Death to Dependencies (Video)
15 minutes read.

"Work doesn't care about your structure. [...] dependencies become opprutunities of collaboration." -- Fantastic video by Jim Benson that I highly recommend sharing internally with your teams.

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The Skill/Experience vs. Outcomes "Curves" Look Different
3 minutes read.

I like this framing by John Cutler on the importance of setting the right environment for the team. It's not enough to attract and retain good talent.

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Why Most Strategies Lack Clarity
4 minutes read.

"The unlock, I think, is realizing that you can confidently communicate a coherent strategy that also acknowledges uncertainty. You know what you know. You assume what you assume. You believe what you believe." -- short and to the point. Strategy, like planning, has merit by helping us prioritize and make decisions. It doesn't mean these are the right ones. They are only right within the constraints and context we have now.

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I've Been Managing People Remotely for 8 Years. Here's How to Be a Better Manager in a Remote (distributed) Team (Thread)
4 minutes read.

So many great gems that all managers should learn from and practice, not only remote ones: "Most of these tips would directly translate to an office. If you are a good manager in the office, transition shouldn't be hard. i.e. you don't need to smell people to manage them." -- I love the advice on how to run great 1:1s and the importance of documenting how you work, setting expectations, etc.

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Binstack: Making a Maximal Multi-Dimensional Decision
11 minutes read.

Jason Cohen shares his approach for solving the problem of maximizing a decision when there are multiple input dimensions that cannot be compared with each other, e.g. "growth" vs. "customer delight" vs. "market differentiation." Ordering the attributes you prioritize by is the key challenge for many companies. We often want to do "AND" versus "OR," making it very hard for us to shut down or delay activities we believe are valuable.

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@mmay3r: Cynicism makes you look smart and is discouraging for others. Optimism makes you look stupid and is encouraging for others.

@YGoncho: One of the biggest differences in being an entrepreneur is that you meet about 100x the amount of new people you would otherwise. And while it evidently means more assholes, it also means a lot more incredible, inspirational and phenomenal humans. And I absolutely love it.