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.

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).

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.

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.”

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. 🎉

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.

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?

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) 🥳

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.

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).