Software Lead Weekly

The Stories in Our Heads (Fact vs. Meaning)
6 minutes read.

"The first thing to take away here is that everybody makes up stories about stuff that happens. You have done this today—I guarantee it. The second thing to take away is that people are especially prone to making up stories when there are missing facts. For example, if I’m late to a meeting, you don’t know why I’m late. You know I’m not there. So until you can get more information, you have to sit there not knowing. And people hate not knowing. So we make up a story to avoid living in the scary Land of Unknowing." -- This is a powerful insight worth remembering next time you consider whether or not to share context, motivation, and tradeoffs.

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How Dare DeepSeek Stole the Stolen Data.
1 minutes read.

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

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To Change the System of Work We Must First Change Leaders’ Mental Models
8 minutes read.

Scott Millett covers how leadership changed over the years and the mindset and practices we should adopt in the age where we pay for intelligence and creativity. Yes, without execution it's impossible to start a business, yet without sustainable execution it's impossible to build a business.

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Bad Idea: Platforms Automatically Improve Productivity.
3 minutes read.

Jason Yip with an important reminder: "Just because it’s called a “platform” doesn’t automatically mean it reduces the cost of effort. [...] Platforms as products improve productivity; “because I said so” platforms do not."

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We Got These Phone Booths (A K6 From the 1930s, and a KX100 From the 1990s) for the Stripe Lobby, as a Reminder That There Are Always Two Paths in Everything We Make: Something That Elevates and Makes You Smile, Or, Well, Whatever the Thing on the Right Is.
3 minutes read.

You can talk about beautify, or you can show it. You can say that quality matters, or you can show it. You can say the little details matter or you can show it. This is how you can do it on a company level.

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The True Self Is the Person You Want Others to Believe You Are
4 minutes read.

"The true self is how we fondly imagine we could be. When we act in accordance with that ideal, then we think, That’s who I am. When we stray from it, we think, That’s not me. A related idea has been discussed by the psychologist and relationship researcher Eli Finkel, who talks about the Michelangelo phenomenon. “In Michelangelo’s mind,” Finkel writes, “the David existed within the rock before sculpting began.” The idea is that in healthy marriages, each partner helps foster the other’s best self." -- Rob Henderson with an intriguing thought exercise. Being authentic is living in our future state?

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Antifragility Is a Fragile Concept
4 minutes read.

"Chaos Engineering can be used to remove points of fragility in a system; however, that’s an unnecessary limitation on the value of Chaos Engineering. The more powerful property of Chaos Engineering is that it provides humans with a signal of the safety margin within which they operate. It empowers the people doing the actual work of building and maintaining the system. It puts them in a better position to navigate the chaos inherent in a complex system, prioritize and optimize for the stated and unstated business goals as they go, and respond to unforeseen events when they do happen." -- Humans are part of the (complex) system. We help them learn how to operate within incidents, both technically but also mentally.

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Product Development Processes You Might Not Have Heard Of
7 minutes read.

Don't adopt frameworks or processes without thinking first about what you're trying to optimize for your team. All frameworks and methodologies are bad (most, terrible), yet they can be valuable, so choose what makes sense over what is popular.

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@FitFounder: Being fit after 40 years old while taking care of a family and advancing in your career is a bigger status symbol than owning an expensive car.

@hnshah: You don’t need consensus to align. You need shared context. Alignment starts with understanding, not agreement.