Security is no longer the concern of the CISO and their team - it's the concern of everyone involved
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July 19 · Issue #49 · 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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Security is no longer the concern of the CISO and their team - it’s the concern of everyone involved in building tech. Everyone from product, operations and the techies involved. You may have heard about the twitter security breach this week resulting in an estimated $100K payout through a bitcoin scheme. This scheme involved posting on many high profile accounts such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama. It’s so high profile that the FBI are now involved. Although an official post-mortem has yet to be officially released, there are notes of social engineering to gain access to company slack and then escalation of privilege through plain text credentials found in slack to get access to an admin panel with apparently unrestricted access. This is a timely warning for all technical leaders to revisit your own security processes. Like software quality, “shifting left” on security is more effective than “tacking it on the end.” In today’s word of increasing organisational, product and software complexity, attacks are increasingly sophisticated but it often starts with a very simple step, often involving humans 👨💼👩🔧. This is why you cannot rely on a simple solutions and single causes. 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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Twitter's fail whale is suitable given their major secuirty failure this week.
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CSML 🤖 Easy Code for Complex Chatbots!
Cut complex chatbot development lifecycle to mere hours instead of weeks. CSML is an easy-to-learn, scalable and full-featured open-source programming language for expert chatbots. Is your organization developing chatbots now?
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🚀 Verity is hiring a Head of Engineering!
Verity has assembled a strong, interdisciplinary team of engineers with a track record of delivering cutting-edge autonomous indoor drone systems. Will you help take it to the next level?
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Maintaining Your State
Reading time: 5mins Leaders rely on having a good emotional intelligence (EQ) and one part of EQ is self-awareness. Recognising your current emotional state is the key to better communication and navigating difficult conversations and topics. This is why I like this article from Sarah Baca using colours as a way to recognise different states. In the context of facilitations, she shares some clues about noticing how others might show signs of their current brain state.
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When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
Reading time: 7mins Awesome Zine maker Julia Evans (@b0rk) offers some great advice for taking an act of leadership and sharing some great tips about what great sponsorship looks like. It’s underrated and underused practice that leaders and non-leaders can do that can make a huge difference 🎉 for someone.
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Don't Create Chaos
Reading time: 4mins I love the first subheader in this article, “Great leaders vacuum up chaos” from @staysaasy. It resonates a lot with a saying I often repeat, “Great leaders find order in disorder” and this is another variation which rings true. The opposite also rings true, and one I’ve seen too many times. As the article states, “ineffective leadership is a tendency to add chaos when one enters a room.” Don’t be the one that adds chaos.
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How to fix micromanagement
Reading time: 3mins This short article from Dave Winsborough (@winsboroughdave) introduces a nice short model for leaders who can’t step away from the detail - Tight-Loose-Tight for a better way to delegate work.
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Build your own personal leadership manifesto.
Reading time: 14mins This article from Phil Bennet (@phil_bennett) reminds me of the Manager Readme phase (with negative reactions). What I like about this article is that it’s more about the process of introspection and self-awareness that reminds me a little bit about personal retrospectives or conversations you might have with a leadership coach. YMMV.
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The 11 Nasty Habits of a Boss From Hell
Reading time: 6mins It seems to be the week of “avoid these practices” and this is another great article you should use to test against yourself, to make sure you’re creating the best possible workplace for your team. Dana Severson (@danerobert) offers a great set of example behaviours to avoid.
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Your Most Precious Resource
Reading time: 2mins Leaders have all types of resources at their disposal, but there is only one that is irreplaceable. Read this to discover a leader’s most precious resource.
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Ex-Googler's Startup Comes Out of Stealth With Beautifully Simple, Clever Robot Design
Reading time: 15mins This article from IEEE Editors Evan Ackerman (@BotJunkie) and Erico Guizzo (@ericoguizzo) show an exciting development about a simple and useful robot for around the house. What I really love about this article is some of the behind the scenes like the selection of the robot grabber, using the wisdom of crowd choice from Amazon! ☺️
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OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since bitcoin
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Tests that help you find defects faster
Reading time: 10mins This nice article is advice all developers need to read and use for writing tests that are useful. Thanks to Philipp Giese (@philgiese) for putting such clear, actionable advice in a short article.
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The Lock-In You Don’t See
Reading time: 7mins One school of thought means that architectural decisions are those that are hard to reverse. To avoid this some may create over-engineered solutions to allow reversing but from a bigger perspective is not worth it, like multi-cloud strategies. Highly opinionated Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) shares other elements that are worth thinking about that will make you think twice about a multi-cloud strategy.
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Macro just raised $4.3M to make your never-ending Zoom calls more useful
Reading time: 5mins I wouldn’t normally link to TechCrunch but this article highlighted an interesting Zoom-product add-on that has some interesting modes with trialling - one focused on collaboration (turning Zoom into more of a shadow mode) and the arena mode that has some interesting features like showing how much “air-time” participants are using and automatically adding entered text into a google doc. The “air-time” will be an invaluable feature for those trying to prevent a single person from dominating a conversation.
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Tech Sector Job Interviews Assess Anxiety, Not Software Skills
Reading time: 8mins A joint study by Microsoft and North Carolina State University came to to the conclusion that a common interviewing process (i.e. using a whiteboard) tests for “stage fright” more than “technical competence.” This underscores how important the candidate experience is at reducing anxiety to allow candidate’s potential to really shine ☀️. The Register also highlights the paper’s conclusion that whiteboard testing also adds inherent bias to the process.
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5 Lessons From My Experience Writing OKRs
Reading time: 2mins A lot of technical leaders struggle with OKRs (and goal setting in general) so I like this short and sweet article sharing some lessons learned from Engineering Manager Arylee McSweaney (@adrainbowsend) from Etsy.
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Book Review: Project to Product, by Mik Kersten
Reading time: 9mins Thanks to Heidi Waterhouse (@wiredferret) for this fabulous book review. For organisations that have been around much longer, this book will be essential reading and a lot of the lessons learned resonated a lot with my time at ThoughtWorks helping companies with [digital|agile|CD|DevOps] transformation.
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Almanac (Open Source Templates, Guides, etc)
Website A lot of startups/scale ups and leaders looking for guidance about processes others use can find checklists, process guides, templates and more at this website. This stretches across more than tech/engineering disciplines to all types of fields. Definitely one worth bookmarking.
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A great starting list with more in the 🧵. Is there a name for this common bias?
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People Ops/Org practices that sound good in theory but terrible in practice:
- no titles - no managers - unlimited PTO
what else?
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For me this is more about understanding principles rather than specific tools.
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I used to worry about aging out of tech, but more and more I believe there are fundamental properties of complex, distributed system. Different technologies simply move us around within a tradeoff space.
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This is a really powerful 🧵 showing what the power of candid feedback ( ala Radical Candor) can help people grow. It’s also an important example this is only possible with psychological safety
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The most difficult / pivotal moment in my career occured shortly after Sheryl joined FB in 2008. She saw my potential and wanted to give me more responsibility for the business, but decided first to do a 360 performance review. The feedback from my team and peers was devastating.
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And one light hearted tweet 😅
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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