Escaping the Reactive Hamster Wheel trap A lot of leaders I know fall into what I call the Reactive H
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September 13 · Issue #57 · 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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Escaping the Reactive Hamster Wheel trap A lot of leaders I know fall into what I call the Reactive Hamster Wheel trap. It’s easy to find yourself suddenly inside this trap. All it takes are a series of emergencies or many simultaneous requests you say yes to. Suddenly, bam! You find yourself inside the wheel. You know you’re inside the wheel because it feels like you’re moving from meeting to meeting, struggling to keep on top of emails/slack and never feel like you’re making any progress on your key topics. Constant reaction takes away your time and a lack of time leads to reacting more frequently. It’s a vicious cycle. It’s one of the reasons I see effective Time Management as a foundation for effective leadership. As I often say, “ If you don’t prioritise your time, others will do it for you.” Once you’re in the Reactive Hamster Wheel, it can be hard to escape. You find yourself reacting to every email, request, and can never seem to find the time to find your focus. But you can break out of this vicious circle. Even though you may be in the trap this week, you need to look further in the future. Look at your calendar a week or two weeks in advance and add a 1-2 hour placeholder titled, “Focus Time.” Use this time to list out your priorities and where you *should* be focusing your time, not where you *are*. Use this list as a way of evaluating work or requests coming through. If you do this right, you’ll start to say no and find ways to be more proactive and less reactive.
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Photo courtesy of frankieleon (https://www.flickr.com/photos/armydre2008/3716273172/)
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Engineering Manager @ Phorest Salon Software [Dublin/Remote] This opportunity is to join Phorest as a senior member of the development team to support the CTO to create and sustain a high performing, high output, world-class team. Learn more here.
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Multipliers
Reading time: 7mins There are two types of leaders in the world. Diminishers and multipliers. Find out more about these types of leadership in this article.
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5 Takeaways From Netflix CEO's New Book
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A data-centric approach to understanding underrepresentation and its impact | LeadDev
Reading time: 15mins
LeadDev.com have been churning out tonnes of great content lately ( full disclaimer: I am one of their contributors). This article by Tutti Quintella (@tuttiq) is one I think all leaders in tech need to read. It’s a very succinct article summarising the state of our industry when it comes to under-representation. She links to research reports and also what actions leaders can and should take.
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How I operated as a Staff engineer at Heroku
Reading time: 15mins Not all leaders are managers and I love this story from Amy Unger (@cdwort) which details parts of what she spent time at Heroku as a Staff Engineer. She offers many great insights into some of the activities that made her effective and what you might take inspiration of to do yourself in your own leadership role.
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Things I Learned to Become a Senior Software Engineer
Reading time: 39mins One of the things I expect from Senior Software Engineers is how they take acts of leadership without being asked to do. Neil Kakkar (@neilkakkar) shares a lot more about his personal journey on becoming a Senior Software Engineer and gives examples of what acts of leadership others can take. These behaviours are great to help others level up their impact, which in itself, is a good act of leadership.
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Level up your technical leadership skills on Sep 23, 2020 (click image above)
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Solving real-time collaboration using Eventual Consistency (AKA an introduction to the Fluid Framework)
Reading time: 4mins Microsoft have recently released a new open source project aimed at making data-sync over distributed services easier. Think about collaborative co-editing documents like in Google Docs and this project is aimed at making that easier. You can see the blog announcement here (Reading time 3 mins) but I like this article by Matt Aimonetti (@mattetti) who gives a great introduction and simple walkthrough at how it works at a conceptual level.
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Roadmap to becoming a data engineer in 2020 (Github Repository)
I’ve seen Data teams working closer with development teams and a common role is the Data Engineer. There’s not a great amount of guidance for how people move into Data Engineering, so this GitHub repository offers a great visualisation of the skills, tools and capabilities for Data Engineers written by Alexandra Abbas (@alexandraabbas) and her team at Datastack 👏
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Introducing the Polyglot Code Explorer
Reading time: 16mins
Kornelis Sietsma (@kornys) recently open sourced a new project for visualising code bases with multiple programming languages. This is any system of any reasonable complexity today. I can see this tool being super helpful when trying to analyse a system for technical debt, or opportunities to improve the design and architecture of your existing system.
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Reading Code is a Skill
Reading time: 10mins Early on my career I learned that you’ll read code more than you’ll write code. The focus always seemed to be on how to write readable code and so I love this perspective that Trisha Gee (@trisha_gee) offers in her article. She’s totally right about that as well. Although we can still improve how we write readable code, we should totally treat reading code as skill itself and try to improve that. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a book on that subject either.
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(Podcast) Interview with Don Reinertsen (Part 1)
Listening time: 53:45mins Don’s book, Principles of Product Development Flow is essential reading for technical leaders so it was a pleasure to listen to this podcast where Mik Kersten (@mik_kersten), author of Project to Product chats to Don. In part 1, they cover lots of topics including product decisions from an economic tradeoff perspective, moving away from deterministic planning methods and thinking about the time from seeing an opportunity to committing to delivery it. You can also find part 2 of this podcast here.
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From Procedural to New Knowledge: Leveraging Your Team’s Know-How
Reading time: 6mins A common bottleneck in software teams are caused by specialisation and knowledge silos. Each of these results in waiting, queueing and frustration. Great technical leaders know this and encourage their team to share knowledge and skills. This article by RC Victorino (@rcvictorino) shows some ways to get this done.
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Tech firms face growing resentment toward parent employees during COVID-19
Reading time: 12mins I know many parents who worry about how their family obligations affect their perceptions at work when events happen outside of hours. This article by Ian Sherr (@iansherr) seems to indicate the forced remote working triggered by COVID-19 seems to be amplifying this as it blurs the boundaries between work/life more. Definitely something to watch out for in your own teams and to be careful about what behaviours you encourage.
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This “simple” diagram from the Cloud Native Foundation tries to show the current ecosystem of cloud tools based on applications. 🤯 Keysey Hightower puts it succinctly in this tweet below…
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When the mail merge should have been caught by a human smell test. This is why the AI won't be taking over anytime soon. 🤓 https://t.co/5X78A6ouZO
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Some great words of advice about what to optimise for in software teams.
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Programming, no matter what level, is mostly trial & error. So before anything else, optimize for the shortest feedback loop possible.
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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