In this edition, I want to summarise some news I found interesting for the week that doesn't normally
|
|
August 16 · Issue #53 · 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.
|
|
In this edition, I want to summarise some news I found interesting for the week that doesn’t normally fit into the newsletter. Let me know if you like this slightly different intro. At the start of the week Mozilla laid off 250 people after declining revenue. Those you who are hiring may be interested in the talent directory they created. Worry over one of their significant income streams (from Google) seems to have evaporated though with a new contract recently signed. Apparently payments from search engines to be default for their region provides ~90% of Mozilla’s revenue. An in more remote working news, a couple of other tech giants indicated a “more permanent” work from home approach including Facebook (until Jul 2021) and Atlassian joining the ranks of others like Twitter, Zillow, Shopify, Square and Slack. 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 🙏
|
|
|
🌟🌟🌟 Want to reach thousands of engineering leaders around the world? Maybe you want to share a leadership role you’re looking to fill? Interested in becoming a sponsor? Get in touch for details. 🌟🌟🌟
|
|
|
The Pinterest Paradox: Cupcakes and Toxicity
Reading time: 7mins (Medium Paywall) Former COO at PInterest and Executive at Google and Square, Francoise Brougher (@FrancoiseBr), shares a very personal leadership journey that I recognise far too often. This shows some of the struggles and biases of some leadership teams and also the consequences when some leaders cannot grow and evolve.
|
Why Is This Idiot Running My Engineering Org?
Reading time: 8mins (Medium Paywall) I really enjoyed reading this article from Marianne Bellotti (@bellmar) who kicks off with a wonderful story followed by a great leadership lessons involving two great powerful questions. You’ll have to read the article to find out what they are.
|
Reasons to step into a leadership role (and the reasons not to)
Reading time: 9mins I’ve grown a lot of leaders and also seen a lot of leaders and a significant influencer to a new leader’s success is their initial motivation. In this article, I share 5 good reasons to step into a leadership role, and few less good reasons to seek a leadership role.
|
The path to managing managers
|
|
Saying Goodbye to PhoneGap
Reading time: 4mins
Max Lynch (@maxlynch) reports that Adobe are shuttering PhoneGap. The joys of cross-platform frameworks promising productivity but in my experience rarely delivering. These tools always have a trade-off of offering the lowest common denominator experience which is rarely what you want in mobile apps. ReactNative *cough* *cough*… 😅
|
The technology behind fighting harassment on LinkedIn
Reading time: 6mins This is a very much needed article about the approach to creating more inclusive spaces for networks. Authors Grace Tang, Montinee Khunvirojpanich, and Ting Chen outline their general approach which is much more useful than tooling that they don’t mention.
|
The Golden Rule of Platforms
Reading time: 5mins Platform teams and platform products are such overloaded terms. However this article from Kislay Verma (@kislayverma) offers a number of useful heuristics for thinking about platforms.
|
State of Frontend 2020 Report
Reading time: 25mins or a 56 page PDF The world of Frontend continues to evolve and The Software House (@RealTSH) recently published their report based on a survey of 4K+ self-identified frontend developers. Some interesting findings like React still the dominate JS framework and a significant majority (77.2%) of respondents already using Typescript. Sadly 23% of developers say they use CI 😞 highlighting how some parts of modern engineering culture haven’t jumped the divide.
|
A British AI Tool to Predict Violent Crime Is Too Flawed to Use
Reading time: 12mins In another UK government multi-million £ project gone wrong, this ML-based gun and knife crime prediction tool turned out useless. This article by Matt Burgess (@mattburgess1) details some of the interesting findings including how the system was once claimed to predict crime with 75% accuracy, the finding of a “fatal flaw” showed it closer to be 14-19%!
|
Limit Work for Reliable Servers (with examples in Go/gRPC)
Reading time: 4mins If you’re trying to build resilient systems (including the human/people systems that build software systems), then limiting work in progress is such a good practice. Evan Jones (@epcjones) offers a very clear simple example related to request processing in Go-based services.
|
|
Secure at every step: A guide to DevSecOps, shifting left, and GitOps
Reading time: 6mins PM software supply chain security Maya Kaczorowski (@MayaKaczorowski) offers an amazingly succinct and useful guide to understanding DevSecOps and where you can start on your journey. I hear of too many organisations still leaving security practices until too late and this is an excellent guide on how to “shift left” with it. 👏
|
The Pandemic Workday Is 48 Minutes Longer and Has More Meetings
Reading time: 3mins An article from Jeff Green (@JeffAGreen) highlights a study of 3.1M workers. The tl;dr is that many people seemed to have replaced their commute with more work time. Are you one of them?
|
How to Run a Remote GameDay
Reading time: 9mins This is a very clear guide by Matthew Helmke (@matthewhelmke) on how to run a “Game Day”, a dedicated day for running chaos engineering experiments with your team. Excellent for learning about your organisational and system resiliency.
|
|
|
|
Underrated: Promoting a writing culture within companies.
|
|
|
|
|
|
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please send me feedback and share with others!
|
Did you enjoy this issue?
|
|
|
|
If you don't want these updates anymore, please unsubscribe here.
If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here.
|
|
Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
|