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.

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.

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.

Watch this space as James Stainer (@jstanier) author of Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager, introduces the first of a series of article tackling the topic of moving to a lead-of-lead type role. In smaller companies this might be called a Director of VP role while in others it might be called something like a Senior Engineering Manager or Head of X.

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*… 😅

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.

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.

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.

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%!

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.

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. 👏

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?

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.