How has the start to your year gone? It's just past the end of February so it's a good time to reflec
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March 1 · Issue #29 · View online
Level Up delivers a curated newsletter for leaders in tech. A project by http://patkua.com. Ideal for busy people such as Tech Leads, Engineering Managers, VPs of Engineering, CTOs and more.
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How has the start to your year gone? It’s just past the end of February so it’s a good time to reflect on your yearly goals. If you don’t have yearly goals, maybe it’s a good time to think about what you want to do in the next 3 or next 6 months. Those first stepping into technical leadership goals often need support setting goals for a longer period. Their previous roles meant others set priorities or goals and now they have to decide. The difficult bit, which you never get perfect, is knowing what to focus on and therefore, what not to focus on. In order to say yes to something, you have to also say no. What are you explicitly saying yes to? What are you explicitly saying no to? If you’re not doing either, it’s likely you’re being too reactive as a technical leader. I hope you enjoy this week’s content. If you find it useful, please forward to someone else and send me feedback. |
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What are your goals for the year or for the next 3-6 months?
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Google's Top Productivity Expert, Laura Mae Martin, Says This Is How You Should Spend Your Day
Reading time: 4mins Many leaders struggle to manager their time, so I really liked this short article sharing some advice from Google’s Executive Productivity Adviser (What a role!) Laura Mae Martin. If you have some more time, I’d also recommend watching some of her videos here. |
Maximize your team. How I created an Engineering Roadmap – John Graham
Reading time: 7mins I’ve included this in the Leadership section because I know many technical leaders create roadmaps but many people don’t share how they go about doing so. John Graham (@JohnGrahamDev) shares how he approached this. |
Effective career conversations
Reading time: 5mins I love having growth conversations with people because I’m passionate about helping people align their personal goals with opportunities. In this article, Yuan Liu (@RealYuanLiu) shares some advice for approaching these conversations in 1:1s. 👏 |
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The Wall of Coding Wisdoms in Our Office
Reading time: 3mins I love love love Information Radiators and this post shared by Philipp Hauer (@philipp_hauer) how the team uses these as reminders of good engineering practices and principles. What a great idea and what an awesome set of quotes too! |
Why we left AWS
Reading time: 4mins It’s rare to read a case study about leaving a cloud provider, let alone AWS, so I found this article by Son Nguyen Kim (@nguyenkims) quite interesting. |
Case studies in rearchitecting
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Radar retrospective: 10 years of ThoughtWorks Technology Radar
Reading time: 5mins The Tech Radar, first published by ThoughtWorks in Jan 2010 has been a popular metaphor, tool and visualisation to help organisations think about technology roadmaps. In this article, a number of key contributors share their reflections on this tool.
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CodeNode in London Relaunched by Trifork as Conference Venue
Reading time: 1min Great news for the tech community in London. Late last year, SkillsMatter had shut their doors which included their community space, CodeNode. It looks like it will now reopen. 🎉
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Computer Programming Skills for 2020: Survey Results from 116,000 Developers and Hiring Managers
Reading time: 11mins This article provides a summary of a HackerRank developers skills report. It provides some interesting highlights about the supply and demand for particular programming talent around the world. Some of the conclusions resonate with some of my own opinions. |
Team Objectives
Reading time: 5mins Like the author of this article Marty Cagan (@cagan), I’ve seen too many horror stories of teams and organisations adopting OKRs. Instead of achieving alignment and setting direction, most implementations turn into a relabelled Management By Objectives (MBOs) which deserves a whole post why that movement doesn’t work. This article proposes a useful alternative approach to OKRs. |
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This is a great twitter 🧵 talking about what you can do to build psychological safety in teams. Click through to read more.
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A study at @ found that psychological safety is the key to high-performing teams.
Leaders who aren't actively creating psychological safety are failing to unlock the potential of their teams.
1 action managers can take *today* to create psychological safety: /1
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A common conversation I hear a lot 🤔
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Alice:
Can an engineer be managed by someone who doesn't have personal experience as an engineer?
Bob:
Obviously not.
Carol:
Then can an engineering manager be managed by someone who doesn't have personal experience as an engineering manager?
Bob:
Of course.
Dwight:
How?
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Boiled this out of some observations of code reviews across multiple orgs and teams. Lower right is my home quadrant but I can flex into enabler/mathematician depending on my stress level https://t.co/NfB3xmtW3x
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If you enjoyed this newsletter, please send me feedback and share with others! |
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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