First time technical leaders fall into the trap of saying yes which leads to burnout. Find out how to say no, without upsetting people in this article.

Although this an article from Tom Foster (@fosterlearning) about questions to ask for interviews, you can also use this list to evaluate your own behaviours. All of these behaviours are essential for great leadership (which is why I prefer the term foundation or core skills rather than soft skills).

You may have heard about controversy in the UK for the build out of a COVID-19 tracing app. It includes a £11.2M for 10 week development and apparently 160 people involved. This short article breaks some of those details down on how not to run a software project and a clear failure of leadership.

As complexity in front end rises, the ideas of microservices done well (highly cohesive, loosely coupled and owned by different teams) translates into micro frontends. Batuhan Tozun (@batuhantozun) from Turkish online marketplace, Trendyol offers a nice case study on how they migrated to a micro frontend.

This is an excellent article from James Governor (@monkchips) pointing out problems with the current approach to multi-cloud (k8s all the things!) and an insightful way of thinking differently about it. Rather than focusing a tool, he introduces the fun acronym SMOKEstack (Serviceful, Mashable, Open, K©composable, Event-driven.) as a way of choosing cloud capabilities. It’s still early days to see if SMOKEstack sticks but I really like this different way of thinking about cloud choice.

Who doesn’t love a juicy post-mortem? Kudos to Laura Nolan (@lauralifts) for sharing an extremely well-written article detailing what events lead to a recent outage at Slack. It’s a great reminder of how complex modern software looks like today and another reason to understand how systems interact. In this case, part of the issue here was the broken monitoring (hopefully not triggering the who’s going to monitor the monitor conversation!)

I know a lot of tech companies use AWS Spot Instances, so it’s nice that Blake Stoddard (@t3rabytes) shares how they manage this as part of scaling up Hey, the new email provider.

As organisations grow, it’s natural to to have some sort of Technical Program Management role. I ran an interview in my last company with a TPM to help others understand more about the role. In this article, experienced TPM John Walpole (@jwalpole) shares the principles TPMs at Lyft use. My take on these principles is they take healthy product engineering team principles and apply it to the TPM field. Though it may seem obvious to some, I see this rarely lived out in many companies.

This article will be interesting for those of you also wearing a product hat. Even not, this great list offers many insights to keep you well-rounded. Put together by prolific writer and product evangelist, John Cutlefish (@johncutlefish), this list offers many great insights and lessons learned.

I’ve had a number of conversations about team charters, purposes and I’m including this article because I think Netflix Studio Engineering does a great job of highlighting a) their mission b) how it fits into the bigger company c) focuses on the why and d) a high level breakdown of their mission. It’s clear about what the department will (and also won’t) focus on. 👏

Anna Shipman (@annashipman) from the Financial Times shares how they moved away from from project (called “initiative-based”) teams to more product (called “durable”) teams. It’s a great article going into some of the trade-offs and the steps along the way. If you’re looking at reading more on this, I can highly recommend the book, “Team Topologies.”