The last issue of Level Up (#50) was a recap edition and from your comments and feedback, many of you
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August 2 · Issue #51 · 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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This week was mostly a holiday 🏖 week for me and I tried to avoid work related matters. Taking regular breaks, particularly extended ones are important for recharging your batteries. I also find it’s useful for connecting and generating new ideas. Even in times where you can’t travel, I know more people experimenting with “Staycations” (P.S. I love this word and there’s even a wikipedia page for it). Breaks are important for everyone but given that leadership roles are multiplying roles, it’s even more essential you take holidays. It’s also a great test of leadership. For me, if a leader steps away for a week and everything grinds to a halt, it’s a strong leadership smell and often a red flag. Leaders shouldn’t be a single point of failure (SPOV) and should be building a team and managing a system to ensure it can continue without anyone, even the nominated leader. 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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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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🌟🌟 Interested in sponsoring to reach thousands of engineering leaders? Looking for a VP Engineering or CTO? Get in touch now. 🌟🌟 |
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VPE and CTO (The first 90 days)
Reading time: 1mins Seasoned technical leader James Turnbull (@kartar) shares his mind map of what he thinks a new VP Engineering or CTO should cover in their first 90 days in a new role. 💯 |
7 Tips to Optimize Remote Dev Team Productivity
Free E-Book: 39 pages An interesting free e-book from Microsoft with very practical tips about what leaders can do to improve developer team productivity in a remote setting. There’s some great stories describing how remote teams can work effectively.
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The Importance of Building a Diverse, Well-Rounded Software Engineering Team
Reading time: 7mins This is a lovely article from Annie Zhou (@anniiness) that demonstrates why building diverse, well-rounded teams are important. I’ve included it in the leadership section because Annie shows how leaders can (and should) take part in this actively. |
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This is perjury: A summary of the big tech hearings
Reading time: 11mins I’ve read a number of articles about the US government hearings with the great tech companies. Given the global reach of these US-based companies, the consequences of these hearings have implications for us all around the world. I remember early on in my career a similar hearing on ATT’s monopoly, which lead to the split off of Lucent/Bell Labs. This is the most well written article I’ve read on this topic yet. Well done to Mark Hurst (@markhurst) for writing such an excellent summary. |
Synchronous vs. asynchronous communications: The differences
Reading time: 8mins A nice and simple article written by Priyank Gupta (@priyaaank) not only describing the differences of communication styles but also the implications and trade-offs in the context of microservices. |
AI Myths
Link to Website This is a hugely needed resource I’ll be bookmarking and sharing with so many people. Built by Daniel Leufer (@djleufer) this website covers the myths, misconceptions & inaccuracies that confuse people about AI. 👏 |
Comcast credits AI software for handling the pandemic internet traffic crush
Reading time: 11mins Telecommunications traffic is complex and variable (hello COVID-19!). This article written by Dean Takahashi (@deantak) shares an interesting use of ML to manage the traffic complexity and how they’ve put ML into action to allocate bandwidth more dynamically. 🆒 |
TikTok is opening up its algorithm and challenging competitors to do the same
Reading time: 4mins I find this article from James Vincent (@jjvincent) super interesting. We’ve seen open source libraries, frameworks and applications but company algorithms and processes are kept out of the limelight. The reasons for this are understandable but would be very unusual for tech companies. I’ll be watching to see if this sets a trend or not. |
The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2020 by JetBrains
Reading time: ~20 minutes I always look forward to this report from JetBrains (@jetbrains). This year, it contains results from almost 20K developers. Learn about trends in programming languages, tools, technologies, and even developer lifestyles. |
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Engineering Productivity: Measure What Matters
Reading time: 5mins Every engineering manager struggles to think about what to measure. Gergely Nemeth (@nthgergo) offers his ideas about what to measure. |
A Mid-Year Check-In: 2020 HR Industry Trends and Insights
Reading time: 7mins I don’t dip into the world of HR too often, but I look at the role of HR in companies. Are they an administrator, or are they strategic? Are they still called HR or are they called the “People Team” (recognising people aren’t resources). This is nice short summary of trends happening in the HR community published by Ben Travis (@bmtravis) that’s worth understanding as a leader. Remember these people are key partners in thriving organisation. |
Siemens rolls out ‘mobile working’ plan for more than 140,000 employees
Reading time: 4mins Germany is sometimes considered slower at adopting SV-style policies. Lisa Ardill (@ElseeArdill) reports one of Germany’s largest engineering (not just software) companies announced a move to make it a permanent fixture, even post COVD-19. Read on to find out why and how. 🏃♀️ |
Is Agile is obvious?
Reading time: 6mins I always pay attention to what Allan Kelly (@allankellynet) writes/says because he shares many sensible and pragmatic ideas. When people talk about something as “obvious”, I think about their experiences that lead to that. Knowing that everyone has a different collection of experiences makes you double think about that word and Allan explores that in the world of agile/non-agile. |
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This is such a great twitter 🧵 on learning. This will be particularly fascinating for those of you with children.
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It's never too late to learn something and never too eat to share knowledge with others.
My 11yo is getting more into Python so I decided to do (separately) the same intro Udacity course and be a study buddy.
And something interesting happened.
A thread.
(1/N) https://t.co/ln7VuwAf9s
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Very much agree with this
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Software architecture is all about decisions. Models are largely just the scaffolding we use to visualize, reason about, and document those decisions. Code is the medium whereby we make those decisions manifest.
Every enduring system has all three of these, in varying quantity.
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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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