Last week I tried something a bit different for the newsletter introduction. Thanks to you who gave m
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August 23 · Issue #54 · 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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Last week I tried something a bit different for the newsletter introduction. Thanks to you who gave me feedback on it. The results were… mixed. Some of you liked the change. Others of you keep up to date with general industry trends and wanted a stronger focus to leadership themes. With an experiment like this and mixed results, I use my north star to calibrate. For me, my current north star is accelerating the growth of technical leaders, software delivery and organisations. It’s a good reminder at a) experimentation is healthy, b) feedback is important and, c) having a strong vision to return to provides clarity. Ask yourself, what is the your north star for your organisation, team or yourself? What are you doing to remind your team and yourself of what it is and what actions do you take to make it come to life? I also have some exciting news, aligned to my north star, to share with you next week so keep your eye out for that! 🥳 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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When Your Job Comes Without a Map, You Need This Skill
Reading time: 5mins One of the greatest difficulties for those stepping into leadership roles is suddenly dealing with ambiguity. This increases as a leader’s scope or responsibility increases. This excellent article by Stephen Martin offers some great advice on how to tackle this.
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Cloud Native and Wishful Thinking—or, How to Avoid Buying Coconut Headphones
Reading time: 8mins
Jamie Dobson (@JamieDobson) warns us about the dangers of Cargo Culting and some of the funny history behind the term. It’s a trap many leaders fall into out of insecurity, worry or stress. I always find it’s useful to ask, “Why are we doing X?” or “What do we hope to achieve with Y?” to counteract this. If the answer is, “Because Netflix/Google/etc do it” then it’s time to dig deeper.
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Extreme Programming Creator Kent Beck: Tech Has a Compassion Deficit
Reading time: 11mins I’m including this interview by Tatum Hunter (@Tatum_Hunter_) with Kent Beck (@KentBeck) because Beck’s industry leadership (e.g. XP, TDD, etc) has had such a positive impact on my career. This interview also touches upon some of his own personal journey I can empathise with - moving from an IC/Technical Leader into a management role. |
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Mozilla: The Greatest Tech Company Left Behind
Reading time: 8mins (Medium paywall) Given the recent news about Mozilla, it’s hard not to question why. This article from Matthew MacDonald (@prosetech) explores this a bit but also celebrates some of the fabulous contributions Mozilla has added to our industry ( NB using firefox right now!) |
Building resilient services at Prime Video with chaos engineering
Reading time: 15mins For some reason I’m seeing more and more case studies coming out of AWS and this one is very interesting. The authors Varun Jewalikar (@neotheoen) and Adrian Hornsby (@adhorn) also share an open source library tool you might benefit from if you’re interested in fault injection and already running services on AWS. There’s a really great example of a well setup experiment towards the end of the article. |
A college kid created a fake, AI-generated blog. It reached #1 on Hacker News.
Reading time: 6mins (MIT Technology Review Paywall) A few issues ago I shared some articles around GPT-3. This recent article reported by Karen Hao (@_KarenHao) demonstrates the consequences of such powerful tooling without stopping to think about how it might be abused. One particular quote jumped out for me: “It was super easy actually,” he says, “which was the scary part.” 😳 |
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Creating a rewarding journey through an Engineering Growth Framework
Reading time: 4mins A natural part of many growing companies is putting together a growth framework (AKA career path/ladder/map). In this, Head of Engineering Will Lewis shares some details on how they connect this directly to compensation.
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Does remote work make software and teamwork better?
Reading time: 6mins This is a very good question posed and answered by David Whitney (@david_whitney) exploring some of the trade-offs with remote work and its impact on both software and the team who build it. Are you building an environment where people make the most of it? |
Go Slow to Go Fast: Why Process Matters
Reading time: 8 mins Product Lead Kate Brennan at Stripe offers all of us great advice about process. Although the agile manifesto and start up culture might make people avoid process, a good process at the appropriate time can help tremendously (but still, people over process 😉). Kate shares a number of regular processes, how to run them and the value they offer. 🎉
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Shocking no one, not enough foreigners applied for H-1B visas this year so US govt ran a second lottery
Reading time: 5mins In what I imagine as another first for 2020 is how the demand for the precious H-1B visa for the US has drastically changed. Reported by Shaun Nichols (@shaundnichols), I’ll let you read the article to understand perhaps why. Hiring, talent and potentially even business opportunities will certainly be impacted by this in the long-term. |
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This thread 🧵 by Neha (@nerdneha) is worth expanding to read what manager’s have done to help people tremendously grow. So much great advice on *what to do* 👏 |
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Hmmm I want to see something 👀
What’s one thing that a manager’s done to skyrocket your growth? 🚀🚀
(please RT so I can get some more stories!)
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Given there’s an article about chaos engineering in this edition, this tweet felt appropriate to include
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Screw chaos monkey randomly shutting down production machines to test resiliency
People should be given random vacation days to see what knowledge isn't distributed
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Something light hearted to end the newsletter with
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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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