Firstly thanks Tara Ojo (@tara_ojo) for referencing my Definition of a Tech Lead article. Since the role varies significantly across companies and even teams, her article is a great extension where she can offer a more specific set of responsibilities that reflect the context of the FT, where Tara works.

If you’re in the UK it’s probably been very difficult to avoid the Scotland-based independent brewer Brewdog. You might have even heard of them as they opened up into Europe and the US. In this article, Brewdog’s CEO James Watt (@BrewDogJames) reflects on his 13 year journey having started at 24 years old. It’s rare for someone to admit so much vulnerability with their mistakes 👏, a powerful leadership lesson (Full disclosure I hold shares in Brewdog)

In last issue I shared an article technical leaders about the process to build an engineering strategy. With perfect timing, Kit Collingwood (@kitterati) gives a relevant example announcing the digital strategy for the Royal Borough of Greenwich. This links to the blog post announcement and you can click through in the first link to see the strategy aiming for end of 2024.

I can imagine larges parts of a platform company like AWS would use Rust, so this is interesting as Matt Asay (@mjasay) shares some of the elements why they like it. Interestingly they have hired some key Rust maintainers so will be interesting to see in which direction that moves.

I’ve built a number of async task schedulers/orchestrators over my career, so I really appreciated the detail that Arun Sai Krishnan shares in this article with how they designed one at Dropbox. I particularly like how he calls out what they are optimising for (“System guarantees”), constraints (“Lambda requirements”). This is also a really great example of a very readable design document.

Hidde de Vries (@hdv) shares a very well-writen article outlining the very good reasons why we have three different systems for different purposes on the web. I’d never given it much thought but I appreciate those who spent the time and designing it this way.

This is a fun decision-tree from Alex Yates (@_AlexYates_) if you’re unsure about what book to next prioritise reading. You might also find there are some great books on the list you don’t have on your reading list. I’ve read 10/12 on the list (can you guess which ones I haven’t 😜?) If you don’t have the time, Alex has also generously included a useful book summary for each.

This is a fantastic personal productivity process article from Xavier Shay (@xshay), who shares his approach to managing email and the associated tasks. There’s a lot to his system that mirrors my own personal approach. Many people can benefit by improving how they manage their email with this system (and just reflecting on the thinking behind the system) 🎉

This newsletter Level Up started as an extension of the weekly email I sent out as CTO. Esteban Torres (@esttorhe) shares how he uses a similar weekly email to share information with his team. In this article, you’ll read a bit more about the process he uses to do so.

I teach a lot of new leaders various approaches to decision making which is why Phil Haack (@haacked)‘s article caught my eye. I love how this is also a fun retrospective, looking back at the process used to name the .Net package manager, NuGet.

Reading time: 8mins (FT paywall)

Living in Berlin, where there is a rich start-up scene, I found this article from the FT fascinating read. It talks about where the background of people who in Germany who found start-ups of all sorts (and not just in tech companies)