Software Lead Weekly

Are You Serious?
9 minutes read.

"Seriousness is love and curiosity expressed earnestly" -- Visakan Veerasamy wrote a post I felt most of my career, but more than ever when I was 15 to 18 years old, writing code, building useful (to some) things, and feeling that I had to prove so much to others I worked with (often 10-15 years older than me): "It’s pretty funny when you see how, being comfortable with being disliked, actually makes you even more likeable. It’s one of the many ways in which life can be really unfair." This post is for builders with big dreams and the energy to follow through.

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I Ask DALLE-3 to Generate a Pepe but Each Time I Tell It to Make It "More Rare"
1 minutes read.

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

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Good Businesses Have Margin
3 minutes read.

Building a business with high (enough) margins has a powerful flywheel effect: you can continue to invest in your business or pay yourself more to reduce your financial stress levels. High margins can be critical when you think about building a company with a lens of doing it for decades.

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Diving Into Engineering Metrics
9 minutes read.

Nicola Ballotta shares the history of the various frameworks for measuring development productivity. They're all useful to an extent, and terrible in many other ways. Metrics around business SLA (e.g. availability, latency, etc.) are always important, as this is your commitment to your customers. Even in the latest frameworks (DevEx), I'm still missing the perception from the market and the go-to-market teams (sales, implementation, marketing, etc.), as you can always build great software with zero usage and close shop.

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Projects and Companies
3 minutes read.

"It’s far better to be thought of—and to think of yourself—as a project than a company for as long as possible. [...] Companies sound serious. When you start thinking of yourself as a company, you start acting like one. You worry more about pretend work involving things like lawyers, conferences, and finance stuff, and less about building product, because that’s what people who run companies are supposed to do. This is, of course, the kiss of death for promising ideas." -- I love this (always relevant) post by Sam Altman. Start small, stay small as long as possible, and grow only to achieve your targets. Headcount is a vanity metric, and so does "busy work" of everything other than delivering value.

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Notes on “Taste”
8 minutes read.

"Things don’t feel tasteful, they demonstrate taste. [...] Though taste may appear effortless, you can’t have taste by mistake. It requires intention, focus, and care. Taste is a commitment to a state of attention. It’s a process of peeling back layer after layer, turning over rock after rock. [...] The process of cultivating taste is a lot like the writing and editing process." -- Brie Wolfson with a wonderful essay on “taste” and how to develop one.

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So You Want to Write Better? A Long-Form Piece on Some Age-Old Misconceptions
6 minutes read.

Writing is everywhere: Writing a message in Slack or writing an email. Creating a deck for a Technical Design Review. Crafting a BetterNext after a production incident or conducting a retrospective after a project ends. Julie Zhuo shares three different "modes" (think, feel, connect) to try when practicing writing.

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Influence: Lessons From a Staff Engineer and Ex-Twitter 8-Year Tech Lead
11 minutes read.

Jordan Cutler interviewed Ron DeVera on his experience becoming a Staff-level engineer at Twitter and how to effectively increase your circle of influence. Ron's advice on the timing of making suggestions is excellent: "Many times I will see something that can be improved, but I’ll save it in my to-do app because it’s not the right time, or I want to do more research on it first."

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@lwastuargo: One simple framework about communication from @shreyas is to spend 5 minutes to think about the Purpose (uppercase P) and the purpose (lowercase p) of the communication. Purpose is the transactional goal you want to achieve. purpose is what you want the other person to feel after the discussion

@dharmesh: You've heard the advice: "Get your steps in." Good advice for your physical health. My advice: GET YOUR WORDS OUT. Make yourself write regularly. Hit that publish button. Consistency compounds.