(Apologies for the delay - I had some scheduling issues! 😅) Last week I mentioned I had some very exc
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April 20 · Issue #36 · 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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(Apologies for the delay - I had some scheduling issues! 😅) Last week I mentioned I had some very exciting news to share… This week I’d like to announce the launch of the Tech Lead Academy 🎊🎉🎇 I’ve had many requests in the past to scale my knowledge beyond in-person workshops. The current COVID-19 situation gave me both time and the opportunity to bring this project forward. My goal with the Tech Lead Academy is to help you advance your skills in whatever situation you’re in. The first course now available is “ Time Management for Technical Leaders.” Time management is a topic many first time, and even experienced technical leaders struggle with, so I want to share how I manage my own time. These techniques allowed me in my last role as CTO to keep relatively sane, structured up until the point I was managing about a 200 person tech team, before I had the help of an Executive Assistant! Hopefully they help you. To celebrate the launch, I’m offering newsletter subscribes a one-time only 20% discount for the course. Register for the course using this link here (discount automatically applied). This offer will be valid until the end of April, 2020. I hope you enjoy this week’s content. If you find it useful, please forward to someone else and send me feedback. Stay safe and healthy 🙏
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The only truthful answer to any question about management
Reading time: 5mins Engineering Manager at Automattic, Cate Houston (@catehstn) offers some great insight for managers (that equally apply to anyone providing advice as a mentor, consultant or friend). Since it’s a short article, I’m not going to give any spoilers here.
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How to Help Your Team Speak Up
Reading time: 5mins A lot of first-time engineering leaders can play the over-assertiveness card as a way to highlight their technical expertise. I’ve seen first hand when this spectacularly backfires when the team (who typically have better context and therefore solutions) starts to ignore the leader. Founder Coach, Dave Bailey (@davesuperman) offers some good advice about finding the balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.
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Leadership Story: Duretti Hirpa, Formerly Staff Engineer at Mailchimp
Reading time: 8mins If you don’t know Duretti Hirpa (@duretti) go follow her on twitter. I’ve seen some of her talks and she’s got great advice to offer and super entertaining. Complete with an amazing laugh too 😂 This article explores a little bit about what it means to be a Staff Engineer (the excellent website offers many other stories too!)
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Refactoring: This class is too large
Reading time: 33mins It’s rare you get to read a play-by-play refactoring like this, so it’s great to see Clare Sudbery (@ClareSudbery) publish this article on http://martinfowler.com. I ❤️ one of the opening lines too, “ This is not intended to demonstrate perfection, but it does represent reality.”
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The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories
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10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
Reading time: 19mins Looking back at history is important to understand why we have the things we have today. Hillel Wayne (@hillelogram) publishes has a fun article looking at how (mostly) past languages have shaped the current set of programming languages we have today.
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Mathematician John Horton Conway, a ‘magical genius’ known for inventing the ‘Game of Life,’ dies at age 82
Reading time: 10mins This is a very sad to hear John Horton Conway passed away due to complications with COVID-19. His “ Game of Life” is such a fascinating example used a lot when studying chaos and complexity. This article is a memo from Princeton where Conway taught until 2013.
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GitHub is now free for teams
Reading time: 1min Wow! This is pretty impressive news from the folks over at GitHub. 👏
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Feedback Frameworks—“The Loop”
Reading time: 8mins A lot of engineering leaders need to fill a gap or sometimes take on a Product role for a variety of reasons. This article from Sara Ownbey Chipps (@SaraJChipps) shares a nice matrix of various approaches used by various product teams at Stack Overflow to fuel product decisions based on customer use/feedback.
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Remote work: Working together when we’re not together
Reading time: 7mins GitHub continues to share how the distributed organisation works. In this next article, Laura Heisman (@LauraHeisman) shares some insight from Senior Product Owner Ben Balter (@benbalter). Ben emphasises successful remote work requires an async-first culture. Some good tips in there for companies with a face-to-face culture to consider 🤔
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Avoid, avoid avoid: Splunk Remote Work Insights
Reading time: 6mins Firstly I want to be clear - this article I’m including is something I strongly discourage use of. It’s a great example of what NOT to do as a leader and also what NOT to measure (includes Lines of Code, Velocity, etc). I’m including here for you to think about how this enables micromanagement, measuring of activity instead of outcome (not desirable!) and I’m sorry if any of you have to use it… At first I thought it was an April’s fools joke, but it seems like they’re serious 🤮. Check out this twitter thread if you want to see some other reactions.
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Moderating Discussions Over Video
Reading time: 5mins A lot of you will be spending time in virtual meetings and I haven’t come across a lot of advice that focuses on this topic, so sharing it here wider. Beth Andres-Beck (@bethcodes) offers some very practical and useful advice from the basics, to facilitating and improving accessibility.
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A drawing I made today: technical debt (or more likely a rotten codebase), explained to non-technical people! https://t.co/SKq9X9zM3J
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Click through to read a bit more about the 🐔🤖 and the seemingly positive effect its had! Hilarious tech invention.
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If I Told You My Idea Was a Robot That Harasses Chickens, You Wouldn’t Believe Me. But That’s My Best Idea. By Thomas Friedman https://t.co/GVaJ2yoah4
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What a cool AR Proof of Concept 🤯
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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