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February 21 · Issue #80 · 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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The Loneliness of Leadership When a team member takes on a leadership or management role, the relationships with their peers also change. As a leader, this person is involved in many other conversations, sometimes private and confidential, which means they can no longer share everything with the team. If their new role involves line management responsibility, the power imbalance creates an even bigger invisible divide, whether or not the new leader realises it. These two differences, and more, foster a feeling of loneliness for leaders. A lot of inexperienced leaders ignore this loneliness to their own detriment. Although you may not be able to talk with your team about certain issues, do not simply “suck it up.” I’ve seen too many times when the stress of loneliness builds up and explodes in unwanted ways, including in personal relationships and lives. Grow a support structure around you to rant, to discuss issues and to have trusted people offer you direct and honest opinions. Often, leaders use a variety of support structures including a therapist, a coach, a mentor, a trusted colleague (typically in a different team or company) or an community group. Pro-tip: Avoid using your partner as the only support structure. Although you may feel alone, you will not be if you pro-actively build a support structure around you 🎉. Enjoy this week’s edition. If you find Level Up useful, please forward to someone you think would benefit. Stay safe and healthy 🙏
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Leadership doesn't have to be a lonely path
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Angie Jones · The ReadME Project · GitHub
Reading time: 10mins
Angie Jones’ (@techgirl1908) career story is so amazing (26 patents and counting!) and I think her story highlights how people can be multipliers without being a manager — a perfect role model for individual contributors and technical leaders who don’t want management responsibilities. 🎉 👏
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Polishing Product Management Skills
Reading time: 6mins Technical leaders often need to fix, or even wear the Product Management hat. Here are some resources to help you polish your Product Management skills.
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Let's talk about 4/3 time
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An online workshop to level up your tech leadership skills. Next dates Mar 17, Apr 21. Click the banner to register now.
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4 Microservices Caching Patterns at Wix
Reading time: 8 mins Wix has huge amounts of traffic with more than 500 billion HTTP requests and more than 1.5 billion Kafka business events per day. Natan Silnitsky (@NSilnitsky) shares how they approach scale with Wix’s 1500+ microservices.
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Why webcams aren’t good enough
Reading time: 20mins Most of us are still in countries with some form of lockdown, and are familiar with how bad the in-built webcams, but did you consider why? This is a fun deep dive by Jeff Carlson (@jeffcarlson) who looks into the state of in-built webcams and reflect on the factors about why they’re not very good.
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Shadow Jobs
Reading time: 7mins Slack Staff Engineer Zac Sweers (@ZacSweers) shares an important technique to incrementally upgrading and changing services, dependencies and tools. Read this article to understand how Slack uses Shadow Jobs to catch potential issues early.
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The pros and cons of being a software engineer at a BIG tech company
Reading time: 9mins Life is all about trade-offs. There are no perfect companies but it’s helpful to know what you’re looking for if a company offers you opportunities that align with that. This article from Daniel Chae looks at the trade-offs you make when working at the BIG tech companies.
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What in the World Is World-Class Engineering? (Part 1 of ?)
Reading time: 9mins
JD Carlston (@jdcarlston) explores a very good question for technical leaders to consider. What does World-Class Engineering mean? And also, what are you doing as a technical leader to move towards that? This is part 1 of an incomplete series, but I look forward to reading more.
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A few answers on “guilds” (or communities of practice/interest)
Reading time: 2mins
Jason Yip (@jchyip), Senior Agile Coach at Spotify provides a short article, answering common questions about how do guilds really work at Spotify.
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It would have been difficult to not hear about the 🚀 Perserverance 🤖 landing on Mars this week. A great reminder about high-performing teams.
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"NASA works. When we put our arms together and our hands together and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does."
@ chief engineer and landing veteran Rob Manning celebrates 's successful : https://t.co/Bo74pC4xLO
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Like always, Corey Quinn and the Duckbill Group provides light-hearted (but hauntingly true) when it comes to cloud computing. 🤣 Click the tweet to watch the video.
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Me: "I run @ marketing. Sign this invoice." AWS: "Wait what--" Me: "'Disagree and Commit' on your own time. Sign here. Let's see... what's an AWS differentiator that most people miss? Global infrastructure; it's amazing. BILLIE! HIT IT!"
https://t.co/5c8hc2g1gf https://t.co/ZZJ1AslU0m
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Patrick Kua, Postfach 58 04 40, 10314, Berlin, Germany
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