Anna Shipman (@annashipman) from the Financial Times has published an excellent 3-part guide to finance for non-finance directors. I know many technical leaders and managers would benefit from this as most don’t undergo any training. Worth the long read and notes. This link points at Part 1, but you she has also published the final parts, Part 2 and Part 3.

Leah Farmer (@leahlialeigha) shares some lessons learned from starting a new leadership role just before a year of lockdown. Many of these lessons resonated with me.

I’ve included this article from Nick O'Leary (@knolleary) as he’s a great role model for a person in tech with long tenure. He also demonstrates the impactful work one can have as a technical leader, without being a manager, having reached the title of Senior Technical Staff Member last year. Read a little bit about what he accomplished in his time at IBM.

Dan North (@tastapod) presents a compelling article about the issues with the well-known design heuristic, SOLID. He additional alludes to his alternative (not yet published) with a cute name called CUPID.

Regardless of your technical background, AI affects all of us and technical leaders need to understand how it might shape the systems we build or the opportunities it creates. This very large report (jump to Page 4 for the summary) from Stanford (@indexingai) offers excellent research into various areas. Tip: Read the summary and jump to the relevant section that interests you. Dont feel guilty for not reading everything - I haven’t 😉

Continuing on the theme of AI/ML, I’ve included this detailed article by Theodore Meynard because I think it’s a great example of applying rigorous engineering discipline to an area that is often lagging. If you don’t have CI/CD pipeline around your ML services, read this article to see how others approach this.

James Ward (@_JamesWard) offers an excellent summary of what 20 years of evolution leaves in Java today. Even if you haven’t done any Java programming for 3-4 years, you might be surprised to see how it’s changed over time.

You might know of Nicole Forsgren (@nicolefv) from her fantastic Accelerate book and the DORA metrics. Her new team at Github return to look at metrics in the context of developer productivity, publishing a new framework SPACE (Satisfaction and well-being, Performance, Activity, Communication and collaboration, Efficiency and Flow). This reminds me of a Balanced Scorecard approach for leaders and managers and, I think, essential reading.

HashiCorp has an impressive engineering and product-focused culture. I personally think it’s one of the most modern companies that balance research-intensive work and strong product engineering. HashiCorp have now generously published how they work, sharing individual, manager, team, and company-wide practices. This is a website I’ll be returning to time and time again. Thanks to Armon Dadgar (@armon) and Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh) for generously sharing!

Many organisations swing from one extreme of too-much time on design, to the no-design spectrum. Nick Tune (@ntcoding) offers some practical approaches engineering leaders can use to nurture enough design.