I've seen significant announcements in tech this week that I think are worth highlighting this week.
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July 5 · Issue #47 · 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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I’ve seen significant announcements in tech this week that I think are worth highlighting this week. One of those is MIT apologising for offering a hugely biased dataset used to train ML algorithms. The other is the ACM calling for an “ immediate suspension of the current and future private and governmental use” of Facial Recognition technologies, for “ both technical and ethical reasons.” See their press release here and the letter (PDF) here. 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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Avoid Burnout and Start Saying No. Here's How.
Reading time: 5mins 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.
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Interviewing for Soft Skills
Reading time: 6mins 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).
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This reading list on Matt Hancock’s NHSX contact-tracing app fiasco will surely scandalise you!
Reading time: 3mins 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.
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Micro Frontends: How It Changed Our Development Process
Reading time: 5mins 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.
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The coming SMOKEstack: rethinking and retooling “multi-cloud”
Reading time: 8mins 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.
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A Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day at Slack
Reading time: 8mins 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!)
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Running spot instances effectively with Amazon EKS
Reading time: 10mins 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.
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Technical Program Management Principles @ Lyft
Reading time: 6mins 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.
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50 Short Product Lessons (but still a long read)
Reading time: 2 hours 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.
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Netflix Studio Engineering Overview
Reading time: 3mins 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. 👏
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Unlocking value with durable teams
Reading time: 10mins
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.”
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Many people, including leaders like yourself, encounter imposter syndrome at some time. I like tweet as a reminder it happens to everyone!
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In the latest @ podcast, Hugh Jackman told Tim he was nervous to go on his show. He said he has a habitual thought pattern telling him “You’re not *that* good.”
If even Wolverine has self doubt, you can be ok with your own.
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One for the history books 😂
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The traditional gesture of glancing down and to the right when saying goodbye is believed to originate from the location of the "Leave Meeting" button in a "software" called "Zoom", used during Earth's Pandemic Era. This pre-holographic technology allowed peopl
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This one made me laugh as well! 😂
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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