Software Lead Weekly 
Issue #717, 21st August 2026
This Week's Favorite
Responsibility Is Taken Before It Is Given
3 minutes read.
"Formal responsibility is a trailing indicator, not a leading one." Lalit Maganti's line belongs on the wall of every engineering org still handing out ownership through org charts instead of trust.
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3 minutes read.
"Formal responsibility is a trailing indicator, not a leading one." Lalit Maganti's line belongs on the wall of every engineering org still handing out ownership through org charts instead of trust.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Culture
Me Explaining AI to Friends
1 minutes read.
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.
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1 minutes read.
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.
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Share it via Twitter or email.
Bring a Product Manager Mindset to Your Next Engineering Job
4 minutes read.
"The bottleneck is going to be good ideas." Brian Jenney talks about the scarce skill of knowing what's worth building in the first place, and that's a muscle most of us stopped exercising the moment we became task-takers. Try building small things. Improve small areas of an existing product. Write a short gdoc with why you disagree with a fundamental belief in the company.
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4 minutes read.
"The bottleneck is going to be good ideas." Brian Jenney talks about the scarce skill of knowing what's worth building in the first place, and that's a muscle most of us stopped exercising the moment we became task-takers. Try building small things. Improve small areas of an existing product. Write a short gdoc with why you disagree with a fundamental belief in the company.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Emotional Diversification: Why Do Success and Anxiety Seem to Go Hand in Hand?
9 minutes read.
Martin argues leadership itself demands emotional diversification: "Thinking outside of the box only happens if you actually leave it." -- I'd extend that to teams: the leaders who spot the next move are usually the ones with interests pulling their attention outside the roadmap, not the ones most narrowly focused on it.
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9 minutes read.
Martin argues leadership itself demands emotional diversification: "Thinking outside of the box only happens if you actually leave it." -- I'd extend that to teams: the leaders who spot the next move are usually the ones with interests pulling their attention outside the roadmap, not the ones most narrowly focused on it.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Navigating Difficult Conversations
5 minutes read.
Great post by the team at 37signals that managers can learn from on delivering a difficult message. "It's easy to start rambling to fill the silence, but then you can end up saying things you don't mean to say or drawing out the call unnecessarily." I'd add that the silence is doing work too: it gives the other side room to react instead of just absorbing your monologue. The conversation you're avoiding by talking more is usually the one that needed to happen.
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5 minutes read.
Great post by the team at 37signals that managers can learn from on delivering a difficult message. "It's easy to start rambling to fill the silence, but then you can end up saying things you don't mean to say or drawing out the call unnecessarily." I'd add that the silence is doing work too: it gives the other side room to react instead of just absorbing your monologue. The conversation you're avoiding by talking more is usually the one that needed to happen.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Peopleware
Make Something Nobody Asked For
7 minutes read.
Zach Chmael pushes us to find what to work on by working, not by planning it: "You cannot research your way into every conviction. Some opinions need to be made before they can be stated." What conviction are you sitting on that you haven't tested by actually building the thing? We often default to writing the doc before writing the code, and some ideas won't survive that order.
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7 minutes read.
Zach Chmael pushes us to find what to work on by working, not by planning it: "You cannot research your way into every conviction. Some opinions need to be made before they can be stated." What conviction are you sitting on that you haven't tested by actually building the thing? We often default to writing the doc before writing the code, and some ideas won't survive that order.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Saturation: How Your Software Will Fail at Scale (Video)
51 minutes read.
Lorin Hochstein's sharpest point isn't about saturation itself, it's about what a postmortem is actually for. Most incident reviews burn their energy on root cause and corrective actions, when the real leverage is capturing how the responders thought: what signals they noticed, which dashboards they trusted, what red herrings they chased. That's vicarious learning, and it's the only way the rest of your team gets better at incidents they weren't in the room for. This is why monthly Game Days should be the future of every team with production systems.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
51 minutes read.
Lorin Hochstein's sharpest point isn't about saturation itself, it's about what a postmortem is actually for. Most incident reviews burn their energy on root cause and corrective actions, when the real leverage is capturing how the responders thought: what signals they noticed, which dashboards they trusted, what red herrings they chased. That's vicarious learning, and it's the only way the rest of your team gets better at incidents they weren't in the room for. This is why monthly Game Days should be the future of every team with production systems.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Inspiring Tweets
@oren_held: 2023: embarassed to bump into code that I wrote 1 year ago. It's not my coding style nor quality bar! 2026: embarassed to bump into code that I wrote 2 days ago. It's not my coding style nor quality bar!
- Oren
P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.
P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.