Software Lead Weekly

Communication Is the Job
5 minutes read.

Communication used to be mainly for humans. In the era of LLM and Context Engineering (also known as Prompt Engineering), proper communication is how you articulate the desired outcome. Humans are still emotionally moved by the quality of the communication. The way you structure it logically and emotionally, using catch phrases and pre-mortem the takeaways people might hear is where you can play. I loved the idea of Second Order Audience: "You aren’t just communicating to those who attend your meeting or read your posts and emails. You are also communicating to the set of people that everyone in your audience talks to subsequently. Focusing your message into a format that is readily repeatable by others with high fidelity can be a huge advantage, especially if you can distill it down to short memorable phrases."

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Me Getting Ready to Tell My AI Agents What to Do
1 minutes read.

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

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Build vs Buy in the Age of AI
5 minutes read.

This is capturing so well what I believe many of us see today around SaaS and Generative AI (buy vs. build will become buy and build): "Companies will continue to buy complex and valuable component services for important parts of their business, but these components will be designed to be accessed and controlled by both humans and software. Some of that software will be AI agents acting on our behalf, and some will be customer (or system integrator) defined workflows generated from gen AI tools. I expect that these AI agents will be created by the vendors themselves, by systems integrators, and by end customers. [...] That said, as more non-technical people aspire to create solutions beyond simple personal time-savers, they will need to learn much of what the product world has learned. And the most important lesson of all is that the hard part is rarely building and delivering the solution; the hard part is discovering the right solution to build."

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How to Delete Everything: The Clean-Slate Approach to Technical Strategy (Video)
24 minutes read.

Engineers often fail to come up with creative ideas because they either treat constraints as a lack of permissions to do anything ("it's too much effort, nobody will approve it") or mistake it as good enough metrics ("it takes 5 minutes in the p99, which is pretty good as is"). In my experience, using time capping ("let's give it a week and see where we stand") and having at least one engineer with both skills and optimism can drive asymmetric results that will surprise everyone and create the momentum to push beyond your current limitations. Plum Ertz shares her practices on how to reset your mental state to develop new ideas as a team.

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Practical Notes “AI for Everyone” by Andrew Ng – A Strategical Guide for Tech Leaders
8 minutes read.

"Everyone says AI will change the world, but very few talk about how to actually make it useful inside a business. [...] AI adoption isn’t about replacing people [yet]. It’s about redesigning roles so your team can focus on the parts of work that really need creativity and judgment. [...] One reason many AI projects fail is because leaders treat them like traditional software projects. But AI is different. It’s probabilistic, it needs lots of data, and its results can be unpredictable. That means you need to do your homework on two levels: technical and business." -- Nanda Reynaldi's notes from Andrew Ng’s course, I think, best represent 2025. We're still in the age of considering the outcomes we can leverage AI Agents to solve, but it's mainly on a task or tasks level, versus a role. Build the muscle. Experiment.

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What I Say When People Ask Me for More Money
7 minutes read.

Brad Dunn shares a great framework (and why businesses operate the way they do) for everyone who wants to earn more or get a title in a way that aligns well with the company. This advice should be practiced more often: "Generally speaking, doing good work, keeping people informed, and sharing your work with others is enough here. But just know you can’t sit in a basement doing good work interacting with nobody and think someone will care enough to come to you to recognize your worth. Now and then, you gotta put yourself out there and share your awesome stuff with the world."

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Professional Development Is a Choice
11 minutes read.

Since the age of 15 (which is 26 years ago, I'm old), when I started writing code to get paid, I wondered, "How can I become better than everyone?" I was young and naive, and highly competitive. I was willing to work all the time (after school) and read as many books as I could find. When I grew older, I started to think of it as my "Escape Velocity for Personal Growth": Imagine a graph of Effective Knowledge (information you can leverage) over time. I'm still using this framework to try and learn and grow faster than my current role (and industry) pushes me. It's getting harder with small kids, and that's okay. Life is not linear, and the way we look at our careers shouldn't be linear. Use Alex Chesser's tips & structure to review where you stand and make adjustments that fit your goals. Be intentional and treat yourself kindly.

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@ActionableMind: When you tell people your goals, you get a bunch of dopamine. Usually, your brain gives it out when you've accomplished a hard task you planned on achieving. By telling people your goals, your brain thinks you've already accomplished them, So no need for motivation.

@alexcooldev: Build what people are already paying for, not what you’re just hoping they might want someday.