LinkedIn are making their online training for Diversity and Inclusion open for free apparently until August. This looks like a great course if you want to learn more about diversity and inclusion and what you can do as a leader to build such environments.

Another excellent article from Will Larson (@lethain) naming misalignment of values in an organisation as the Values Oasis. It’s a challenge very leader struggles to balance around strengthening existing values, or the attempt to improve them. The outline articles a nice rule of thumb: Lead through ambiguity, and advocate through disagreement 👍.

Some of you may have come across the eBay scandal linked in this article from Fortune, Vox, Gizmodo and this juicy page from @markhurst. Despite being one of the stranger news about tech, the outcome is a failure of good leadership. The former CEO claims no knowledge about the specifics, but the statements quoted show nothing to discourage the behaviour. As a leader, this is effectively supporting and allowing that behaviour.

This is a very personal story of a manager managing a remote team for the first time whilst navigating the unpredictable storm of COVID-19. Thank you Sergio Sola (@ssola) for sharing such personal details as I know other leaders are going through similar challenges. Knowing that you are not the only one experiencing these challenges is a useful support. My condolences for your loss ❤️.

Maybe it’s because I’m starting to feel old, but I read this article by Max Böck (@mxbck) with a sense of nostalgia. He thankfully isn’t talking about the return of the blink tag or flash, but his comments certainly correlate with some of my own observations. This could be as simple as my confirmation bias kicking in, but I’ll be happier when everyone goes back to offering an RSS feed and laughed at the reminder of Webrings! Geocities anyone?

Microsoft has deemed C++ no longer acceptable for writing mission-critical software. The industry sorely needs to move to a performant, memory-safe language for its low-low system work. And the best choice on the market today is Rust, Levick said.

I know from experience 😅 cloud bills can easily grow out of control if not carefully managed. Good organisations share a team’s portion of cloud expenses with some going one step further and adding a fitness function limiting how much a team can use to discourage waste. This gives some good concrete examples of what that looks like in a GCP world. Their website has a couple of other useful articles on this topic and it looks like more to come.

Another great article from Tanya Reilly (@whereistanya), Principal Engineer at SquareSpace about navigating and influencing the organisation outside of your team. It’s an essential set of skills to build if you’re going to be an effective leader.

This online article (also available as a 14-page PDF) written by Principal Engineer Clare Liguori (@clare_liguori) shares juicy details about how Amazon manage their deployments and why it’s a mostly hands-on process 🎉. My tl;dr is you have to be willing to invest in good automation and apply good engineering practices to your CD pipeline (not just your code). This is a very good article if you’re on your CD journey and one to share and discuss in your team.

I’m super fascinated at understanding and describing how culture differs across tech firms. In this LinkedIn Pulse, veteran tech Michael McNally shares his inside perspective of the contrasts he found working in Google and Facebook in more than 15 years. Lots of interesting food for thought for you to consider, what sort of culture do you want and cultivate in your teams?

Recruiting agency Caissa ran a developer survey here in Berlin and shared the results in this PDF. As a technology leader you’re probably interested in trends in different tech hubs around the world, so this provides some data (based on 123 people). Even if you’re not interested in trends in Berlin recruiting, the report offers some insight about what a poor/good recruitment processes looks like (with a whiteboard interview seen as the most useless but a technical interview seen as the most useful). Unsurprising to me, strong company culture ranks as the most important reason after salary.

Grant Fritchey (@GFritchey) shares some practical advice from his decade long stint working remotely at Redgate. Many of you may still be adjusting to remote working so I hope the article either reassures you you’re on the right path, or offers you new ideas.