What will the end of year look like for you and your team? I have a yearly ritual of looking back at
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October 11 · Issue #61 · 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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What will the end of year look like for you and your team? I have a yearly ritual of looking back at the year. Normally the quieter season between Christmas and New Year to run a personal or a team retrospective. Part of a leader’s responsibility is to look forward, remove obstacles and spot trouble (AKA risk) on the horizon. This is why this time of year is a great time to clarify and reiterate the goals for your team. Think about what is working well that you can amplify to help you reach your goals. What are potential roadblocks or risks you can manage to increase the likelihood of success. You have some time to take action now to influence those goals. Doing so at the end of the year is often too late. Start by asking yourself, “What will the end of year look like for you and your team?” and work backwards. 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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What can you do to help your team achieve their goals by the end of the year?
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Jobs, Wozniak, Cook (Build, Sell, Scale)
Reading time: 7mins 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.
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What Did You Train Them To Do?
Reading time: 5mins 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?
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Why to Start Public Speaking as a Manager in Tech
Reading time: 5mins 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.
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5 People Who Can Help You Strengthen Your Empathy Muscle
Reading time: 9mins (potential NY Times paywall) 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.” 👏
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Announcing Swift Algorithms
Reading time: 4mins 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.
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Celebrities Explain DevOps
Reading time: 1mins, Watching time: 3:25mins 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)
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Keep Secrets out of Your Codebase
Reading time: 5mins 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.
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What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases
Reading time: 8mins 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.
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The Abyss of Ignorable: A Route into Chaos Testing from Starling Bank
Reading time: 19mins 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?
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The Big Tech antitrust report has one big conclusion: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are anti-competitive
Reading time: 9mins 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.
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Congratulations and welcome aboard!
Reading time: 4mins 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.
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Amazing to see judges, who make critical decisions, go to great lengths to inform themselves around serious decisions where they realise they need to understand more detail. A great leadership lesson. Click through to read the article about Judge William Haskell Alsup.
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Reminder that Judge William Haskell Alsup, who first heard Oracle v. Google, actually LEARNED JAVA in order to make an informed ruling, while these higher-court jokers are relying on analogies to Harry Potter and grocery stores. https://t.co/9jKiwefPBK
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You may have heard that Slack is going to have Instagram-like stories, so this tweet will resonate with many leaders/managers 😅
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personally, i'm waiting for google spreadsheet stories
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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