Seeing vs Observing Imagine that you live in an apartment several floors up, only accessible by stair
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November 15 · Issue #66 · 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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Seeing vs Observing Imagine that you live in an apartment several floors up, only accessible by stairs. Every day, you walk up and down those stairs, touching every step. You know that there are many steps. After all, you see them every day. By how many steps are there to your apartment? You’ve probably never noticed. Knowing how many steps is the difference between seeing and observing. In order to improve systems, processes or organisations it’s not enough to see. It is essential for leaders to observe. Unfortunately most leaders are too busy doing and reacting, they don’t have the time to observe and notice important detail. Great leaders aren’t always busy doing or talking. Great leaders take time out to observe and to listen. They take time to seek connections between events or data that may not be immediately obvious before they act. Try something different this week and find an opportunity to practice observing. Focus on something you don’t normally focus on. What did you observe that you didn’t notice before? What that might indicate? 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 🙏
The online guided workshop, “Shortcut to Tech Leadership” is all sold out for 2020. Watch out for announcement for future dates for 2021 🎉!
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Try observing something you don't normally focus on this week
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A Conference for Leaders of Today and the Future
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The Architect’s Path (Part 1)
Reading time: 7mins If you’re taking a technical leadership path and aiming to grow (or further develop) as an architect, what could a journey look like? Architect Elevator author Gregor Hohpe (@ghohpe) outlines his thoughts on the challenge of defining such a path but also offers some concrete ideas that can boost your technical leadership journey.
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Seek Ideas At The Right Level of Abstraction
Reading time: 21mins This article from Cedric Chin (@ejames_c) is worth reading, bookmarking and re-reading. Good leaders draw on strong thinking tools but organisations rarely encourage people to build this. I’ve seen too many technical leaders propose ideas for solving problems at the wrong abstraction (e.g. building software when software may not be necessary).
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An interview with Michelle Gleeson, A Cloud Guru's Director of Engineering
Reading time: 7mins I really enjoyed reading this interview with Director of Engineering Michelle Gleeson (@shelleglee). There are great leadership insights to be gained here like a clear focus on culture and values and providing a supportive environment.
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Rust vs Go
Reading time: 23mins Last week I received some feedback about not enough Rust in this newsletter but I honestly don’t seem to come across many good articles about it. This week I came across this article from John Arundel (@bitfield), comparing Rust and Go in a very balanced manner. I definitely agree with one of the opening statements, “…every programming language represents a set of trade-offs.”
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10 Years of HTTPS EverywhereFoundation
Reading time: 9mins Can you believe it’s been 10 years since the EFF released its HTTPS Everywhere extension? Since its release we’ve had amazing contributions like LetsEncrypt and more! Staff Technologist Alexis Hancock (@nappy_techie) reflects on this anniversary. 🎉
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Has The Modern Web Made Things Better?
Reading time: 4mins Software engineers are always so excited to jump on the latest tools/frameworks and the web is definitely one of those fields that moves fast. This is why I like this question posed by Joe Eames (@josepheames) who explores this question in this article.
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Modern-Day Architecture Design Patterns for Software Professionals
Reading time: 7mins (medium paywall)
Tanmay Deshpande (@StuffTechTanmay) describes 6 design patterns useful for building modern applications. These are all useful approaches that I see regularly and you won’t find in the famous Gang of Four book. Is it time for an updated software patterns book?
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2020 State of DevOps Report
PDF: 54 pages I look forward to reading this report every year (this year it’s 9th). The Accelerate book was based on the research run by this report although I don’t fully understand the split with now Google-owned DORA and the 2019 edition. This edition will be interesting for those exploring internal platforms, wanting to understand what effective change management looks like and effective ways to blend security into your development processes. Nice work to the authors of this year’s edition Alanna Brown (@alannapb), Nigel Kersten (@nigelkersten) and Michael Stahnke (@stahnma) 🥳
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Proof our work-life balance is in danger (but there’s still hope)
Reading time: 8mins As organisations abruptly transitioned to remote working, many technical leaders I spoke to reported higher level of productivity but soon followed by higher levels of burn out. This article by Arik Friedman (@arikf) from Atlassian offers some of the best research I’ve read on this topic, including useful advice for leaders.
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Q&A on the Book Competing with Unicorns
Reading time: 9mins This looks like a great book from Agile Samurai author Jonathan Rasmusson (@jrasmusson). In this book he explores the culture of tech unicorns like Google, Amazon, and Spotify, and dives into the techniques and practices that they use which is useful for any technical leader looking to build a strong tech culture. This article is a Q&A with the author and Ben Linders (@BenLinders).
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An excellent Twitter thread showing how you can communicate effectively using every day situations. Click on the image to expand the thread 🧵.
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A quick thread on availability and organizational culture. Let's say I build a system. It's a house, and needs the house itself, a wood pile (for heat), field of corn (for food), well (for water), and septic tank all working to be considered "available". 1/ https://t.co/3rZDPubmB9
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Wise words from industry luminary Jez Humble.
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It’s weird that when people correctly reject “move fast and break things” nobody considers “move fast and build high quality, resilient systems” since that’s what the evidence says high performers actually do. Moving slowly definitely isn’t the answer because of what Yvonne says. https://t.co/YkOPdcp0Tt
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Hadn’t thought of it this way before: the amount of time a company could spend overall in meetings is no longer capped by the availability of space for those meetings. https://t.co/hxgXS0KiJK
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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