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November 28 · Issue #120 · View online
Level Up delivers a curated newsletter for leaders in tech. A project by https://patkua.com. Ideal for busy people such as Tech Leads, Engineering Managers, VPs of Engineering, CTOs and more.
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Finding your focus time I spoke with an engineering leader this week who complained about never having enough time (one of the reasons I built this course). All leaders face this problem as there is always more work than time. In these conversations, I often ask, “ What is your strategy for finding your flow?” A lot of people sound surprised when they reply, “ What do you mean flow? I’m not an individual contributor writing code. I should be interruptable and available for my team.” While I agree that leaders need to provide timely support and context, there’s a big difference between being 100% on-demand and also finding focus time for you. I remember feeling this way when I lead one of my first teams. When I sat down to work on my own tasks, I would get interrupted. I knew this was good for the team, but I also felt frustrated because I couldn’t find my flow. This frustration surfaced in ways I didn’t mean like raising my voice or being very blunt. My issue was that I didn’t set clear boundaries and shared expectations around how time should be used. I needed to agree with my team time when I could be heads-down, working on what I needed to work on, but also be available. In a co-located room, my team and I agreed on a physical token (a stuffed animal). When it was on top of my monitor, I was in my “focus mode” so people knew to ask someone else, or wait until I was no longer in my “focus mode.” We’d also agreed that “focus mode” wouldn’t go for more than 2 hours. In today’s distributed world, this might be as simple as setting your status on Slack as “Do not disturb.” Others have an automated reply like an “Out of Office” but letting people know that an email response might arrive tomorrow rather than today. The key to this is finding a solution that works for you and for the people you need to collaborate with. As we head towards the end of the year, reflect on how you’re handling interruptions and where you are finding your flow. Drop me an email if you want to share how you find your flow as a leader in tech. Enjoy this week’s newsletter and be sure to pass it on to a friend or colleague.
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Every leader needs time to focus on having the most impact. What's your strategy for finding your focus time?
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Introducing the Global CTO Survey 2021 Report Benchmark yourself against 500+ CTOs around the world. This report shares insights on technology, security, management, challenges, and more. With expert commentary from Scrum.org, Codecademy, Clutch, and CTO Academy.
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5 Signs of (Management) Burnout. Take care of your mental wellbeing
Reading time: 5mins (Medium paywall) Leaders and managers often put the health of their team over themselves but sometimes that can go too far. Ivona Hirschi (@IFikejzlova) shares five signs you may be on the path to burnout. If you recognise some of these signs, it may be time for a break.
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How GitLab automates engineering management
Reading time: 11mins Most engineering leaders and managers need data to understand how and when to react. Seth Burger from GitLab shares some scripts they used to collect information to make better decisions.
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4 Items you need to talk about in your mentor meeting
Reading time: 8mins Everyone will be a mentor at some stage of their career. This might be for someone in a different team, different organisation or to simply share different skills and experience. Nicole Kahansky (@nicolekahansky) offers 4 great topic areas for your next conversation with a person you’re mentoring.
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Due to popular demand, Black Friday deals extended until Nov 30 2021. Use the code BLACKFRIDAY21 for 25% off each course.
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The Unfulfilled Potential of Serverless
Reading time: 8mins I really enjoyed reading Jeremy Daly (@Jeremy Daly)‘s response to a recent shootdown of serverless (or in this case FAAS). Jeremy provides a number of counterpoints to some of the recent criticism by Cloud Economist, Corey Quin. Note Jeremy may have some bias/perspective being a GM of a serverless company 😅
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Learning Containers From The Bottom Up
Reading time: 11mins This is one of the most recent accessible articles I’ve read explaining containers in a step-by-step fashion. Ivan Velichko (@iximiuz) includes some great visualisations and more detailed links in case you want to jump into some greater detail. 👏
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CRISP: Critical Path Analysis for Microservice Architectures
Reading time: 18mins Uber engineers Milind Chabbi (@ChabbiMilind), Chris Zhang, and Murali Krishna Ramanathan recently published an article about a tool (CRISP) they built to aimed at improving the end-to-end performance of a microservices-based system where latency, asynchronicity and other factors make it more difficult to design for performance.
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🌟🌟🌟 Reach thousands of engineering leaders around the world. Maybe you want to share a leadership role you’re looking to fill? Interested in becoming a sponsor? Get in touch for details for a sponsorship slot in 2022. 🌟🌟🌟
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Atom Bank introduces four-day working week without cutting pay
Reading time: 4mins UK challenger bank, Atom, recently announced they are moving to a 4-day week (although they’re still expected to cover 34 hours in the 4 days). BBC Business Report Daniel Thomas reports that their CEO announced this as a voluntary policy inspired by the pandemic to give people a stronger work-life balance.
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The 2021 State of the Octoverse
Reading time: 2mins blog post, ~20mins full report, 2 page highlight PDF GitHub recently published their State of the Octoverse as announced by Eirini Kalliamvakou (@irina_kal). I appreciate these yearly reports that offer one perspective to leaders in tech. Some of my favourite findings show a significant number of people expect to only work co-located post-pandemic (most in some hybrid mode), good automation also improves collaboration and culture and good documentation continues to be key to developer productivity.
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Reframing tech debt
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@ Leadership and investing in people matters so much more than a particular process or methodology. The worst process is improved by good leadership. The ideal process cannot survive poor leadership.
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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