Software Lead Weekly

We Have Learned Nothing: Startup Pundits Sold Us a Failed Science of Entrepreneurship. The Red Queen Offers Something Better.
15 minutes read.

Beautiful essay by Jerry Neumann: "The New Punditry was right to pursue entrepreneurship as a science. Their mistake was that they tried to make it scientific at the wrong level of abstraction. Blank, Ries, and the others tried to discover specific winning moves and teach them as universal method; as a result, their paradigm was never sufficiently adaptive. You cannot follow a flowchart and expect to win. [...] A true science of entrepreneurship embraces the Red Queen dynamic so completely that it rejects any attempt to permanently systematize it. Including, eventually, this."

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Your Boss When It’s Time to Take Credit for All the Work His Staff Has Done
1 minutes read.

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

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What About Juniors?
6 minutes read.

Junior engineers need to understand the risk companies take when they hire them and the fact that they are still pretty expensive in terms of salary and investment (training). Those who figure out ways to provide value in creative ways will learn the job, go deeper in the stack (and wider over time), and leverage the technology. Work harder, own a small area (do it well!), and look for ways to create value. Marc Brooker puts it well: "Junior software engineers who are comfortable expanding their scope shouldn’t, in my opinion, worry about their careers. Those who want to remain narrow, or don’t want to do the hard work, or want a low-ambiguity job taking tasks off a backlog, have a less clear path."

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We've Been Building an Internal Claude Code Plugin System at Intercom With 13 Plugins, 100+ Skills, and Hooks That Turn Claude Into a Full-Stack Engineering Platform. Here's a Thread of Some Highlights. (Thread)
5 minutes read.

You can copy and try many of the tips Brian Scanlan shares from their practices at Intercom. The best companies in the world are experimenting with agentic execution across the different functions in the organization. Do not wait. Do not assume others got it right. Iterate and share your learnings.

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The Guide to Andrej Karpathy's Autoresearch
8 minutes read.

Autoresearch is a powerful concept I thought you might find interesting to learn about and explore (if you haven't so far). Share it with your teammates and have some fun lunchtime discussions about where to try it out or about any interesting results you've seen if you've already done it.

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I'm 60 Years Old. Claude Code Has Re-Ignited a Passion
5 minutes read.

We live in a wonderful time with truly magical technology. This thread made me smile so hard and optimistic that our careers will only get better: "Tools like Claude Code are the ultimate cheat code for me and have breathed new life into my desire to create. I know more than enough about architecture and coding to understand the plumbing and effectively debug, yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details. It's almost an unfair unlock."

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@jasonfried: Being busy is simply being busy. It's not proof of anything.

@dexhorthy: lord give me the confidence of a CEO describing a 2.5x improvement as an “order of magnitude”