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June 28 · Issue #46 · 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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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a number of invites to speak on panels, conferences and podcasts. I usually ask who else is speaking, or for a link to their website to look at past events/episodes. I’ve turned a couple of invites down specifically because their guests have been mostly male, mostly white. In these cases, I politely decline and suggest they use my space to find an under-represented person. This is what I call making space. As a leader, you can choose to take space, or make space for others. When you attend a meeting, you can make space, by inviting others to share their opinions before you do. When you take part in events, you can make space for others by inviting people to co-present, or even asking them to take your place. I like to think of making space as a special form of delegation, but with the intent of hearing from lesser-heard voices. When done well, like delegation, making space is a win-win for everyone. You get time back and you also help people grow, have new experiences and opportunities. Ask yourself, when did you last make space? 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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What is an Engineering Manager?
Reading time: 7mins A few weeks ago, I published the 5 Engineering Manager archetypes. Unbeknownst to me, Amy Phillips (@amyjph) also published a similar article describing different styles of an Engineering Manager. I love how we saw similar patterns but described using different metaphors and models. 👏 |
Stuff I've learned about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion over the past few years.
Reading time: 13mins
Will Larson (@lethain) has been on a writing spree lately and one of his articles is particularly useful for leaders who want to build diverse and inclusive teams.
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Reflections on 12 months at Wizeline
Reading time: 4mins I love reading leaders’ reflections. In this article, Gareth Sutton (@garethsutton), Portfolio Director for APAC for Wizeline, reflects on his first year. I’m including this in the leadership section because I think it’s fascinating to keep a pulse of other tech hubs around the world. In this case, Gareth shares his perspectives on the tech scene in Vietnam, which I know very little about! |
Principles for Managing a Remote Team
Reading time: 12mins
Jay Signorello (@jaysignorello), who’s been doing remote management for a while, shares his approach to managing a remote team. For me, these principles are good principles even if you’re leading/managing a co-located team. It’s still a great reminder,
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kelseyhightower/nocode (GitHub Repository)
You may have heard of the resurgence of the LowCode/NoCode tools. With developers being expensive and in short supply, these solutions will always be tempting for a lot of people. This is a hilarious Github Repo from Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) that’s good if you’re looking for a laugh. Check out the Issues and Pull Requests for even more 😂, |
Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation
Reading time: 16mins I was very fortunate to have met Dennis Ritchie (co-creator of the C programming language and Unix) when I was at University in 2000. I had no idea, but according to this wonderful article from computer historian David C. Brock (@dcbrock), he never graduated from Havard with a PhD because he didn’t send in his dissertation! A fun article if you want a bit of history. |
Rust Breaks into TIOBE Top 20 Most Popular Programming Languages
Reading time: 3mins Rust continues to get a lot of news, this time breaking into the TIOBE Top 20 index for the first time. Vivian Hu shares why in this article. |
After 84 years, Japan's Olympus shutters its camera biz, flogs it to private equity – smartphones are just too good
Reading time: 4mins This news about camera and lens producer, Olympus was very disappointing to hear. I’ve personally got a lot of use out of my m43 camera for the past years and sorry to see this brand go.
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When employee stock options pay off
Reading time: 4mins Germany doesn’t have the long history the US has in startup and stock option land, so this story about Berlin startup Taxfix (@taxfix_de) caught my eye. As part of their last funding round, they decided to reward employees with an offer to sell their virtual stock options. Unusual but a bold move to increase employee engagement. 🎉 |
The Goal Fits the Team
Reading time: 8mins
Christina Wodtke (@cwodtke), author of Radical Focus, has written a lot about Objectives, Key Results (OKRs). It’s much needed too since I see so many poor implementations of it. In this article, she shares 3 different types of OKRs, useful depending on what sort of product phase your team may be working in.
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Hiring Agile Coaches
Reading time: 9mins I’ve interviewed a lot of people who I think are not very good agile coaches. They’re either too prescriptive (typically novices!), want too much ownership (not a coach!) or inexperienced (what’s software development?). Kevin Goldsmith (@kevingoldsmith) offers some good advice on what to look for when hiring an agile coach. This resonated a lot with me and it will help you find the effective agile coaches out there. |
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Although I’ve not included any articles about the new email service provided by Hey.com, this is a nice “behind the scenes” tweet of their tech stack. |
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The HEY stack:
- Vanilla Ruby on Rails on the backend, running on edge
- Stimulus, Turbolinks, Trix + NEW MAGIC on the front end
- MySQL for DB (Vitess for sharding)
- Redis for short-lived data + caching
- ElasticSearch for indexing
- AWS/K8S
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Interesting practice I don’t see regularly implemented 🤔
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"All builds run without network access to isolate the builds and encourage build reproducibility" is one of those little touches I always recommend 👍. It's a great way to ensure unit tests are actually unit tests. A pipeline should be opinionated and an enabling constraint 14/n
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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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