In my training courses I emphasise the need for situational leadership and recognising and drawing on your strengths. Author of the excellent book, High Growth Handbook, Elad Gil (@eladgil) shares 3 leadership archetypes he sees necessary at different stages of a company. Although focused on the CEO role, this is an important leadership lesson to be aware of what strengths you have in your team and what is needed in your particular situation.

This short story by Tom Foster (@fosterlearning) underscores how leaders always have an impact on how their team behaves good or bad. Unfortunately most leaders are unaware how their actions influence their team. I love this question he poses, “What did you train them to do?” What are you currently training your team to do?

Some of you may know I have done a lot of speaking at conferences and I get some requests on how to break into public speaking. Many are unsure about public speaking so was pleased to read this by Kendra Little (@Kendra_Little) on why you might consider this as a technical leader.

The best leaders I have worked with have strong empathy. This article by Emma Pattee (@emmalincolnblog) highlights some advice from 5 people on what you can do as a leader. It’s particularly true that “empathy is not the same as sympathy.” 👏

It’s amazing how many technical interviews grill potential engineers to build detailed algorithms. Most engineering roles are consumers of APIs and libraries who use these, fewer are about building them. It’s great to see a modern language making libraries that make it easier to use sequence and collection algorithms. Read more from this post by Nate Cook (@nnnnnnnn), a member of the Swift standard library team.

Watch this hilarious Cameo video with David Hasselhoff, Flavor Flav, and Carole Baskin who try to simplify AWS, Kubernetes and Docker 🤣 via Tristan Pollock (@pollock)

Best practices for managing secrets in applications continue to change. Co-founder of Atomist, Ryan Day (@jryanday) shares some useful current advice on managing secrets.

We’ve all been there. You talk to business people to find out critical business processes are running on Excel. A truly versatile tool, spreadsheets are useful, in a certain context. In this article reported by Jude Karabus (@OkayJudeMan), a spreadsheet used to track cases in the UK reached the maximum Excel column limit (16,384!). We are all responsible to identify these as technical leaders before it gets to this point and this is certainly a failure in both organisation and process.

Running chaos engineering practices in a bank? Sound scary? Starling Bank is a UK-based challenger bank. In this article, former CTO, Greg Hawkins (@gmorpheme), shares how Starling Bank started on the journey to bring chaos engineering practices to their organisation. If a bank can do it, what’s stopping your organisation?

Where you like it or not, US tech companies influence the worldwide tech industry. This is why it’s worth keeping track of the antitrust case currently underway. This article by  Shirin Ghaffary (@shiringhaffary) and Jason Del Rey (@DelRey) highlight some of the findings from the freshly published 400+ report. Watch this space as it affects all of us around the world.

It’s every leader’s responsibility to ensure their onboarding process (both organisation, department and team) continue to evolve. I still hear of stories of engineers turning up with zero onboarding (an immediately leadership fail!) Dvir Segal (@dvir_segal) offers some great tips in this article on what you can do to craft a humane onboarding process.