Tech Lead Journal

“The strength of SRE is in the alignment of operational concerns between the product management, product development, and product operations."

Dr. Vladyslav Ukis is the Head of R&D at Siemens Healthineers and author …

“Emotional intelligence is about knowing yourself, empathizing with other people, and always defining a win-win outcome in everything you do."

Trenton Moss is the founder of Team Sterka and the author of “Human …

“An engineering manager should make sure that the team has a good balance of delivering things that the business needs with enough capacity to do it …

“Interactions with domain experts play a key role in implementing software. You have to make sure that you understand the problem you’re solving. You …

“The simplest way to describe craftsmanship is pride of workmanship. It is the mindset that you are working on something important and you are going to do it well."

Today's clip is from episode 90 with Robert C. Martin, …

Instead of being given a roadmap of features, an empowered team is given a problem to solve and they get to figure out the best way to solve that …

“Engineering discipline is the most effective, efficient way of doing high-quality work. If our software development practices do not allow us to …

“Every organization has a mission, a vision, and a set of values. As a leader, your number one task is to live those values and talk about them at every opportunity with your team to create alignment."

Manoj Awasthi is …

“Intrinsic motivation is a great predictor of success. When people are doing things they feel intrinsically motivated to do, they tend to be much …

“An ADR is a simple text file describing the context, the decision, and the consequences of a single architectural decision stored in the version …

“Developer experience is an approach to thinking about engineering excellence and maximizing engineering performance by increasing the capacity and …

“The people who are the communicators are the ones visible within companies. Just being technically proficient is not enough. You have to be an advocate for yourself."

Neil Thompson is the founder of Teach the Geek and …

“As a team leader, you will become more successful and valuable if you are no longer a bottleneck for the people who are working with you and under …

“The most responsible thing a human can do, either personally for their own development or the development of others, is play to a person’s strengths."

Brandon Miller is the founder and CEO of 34 Strong and one of the …

“Companies that are successful in getting the most out of the cloud embrace the fact that distributed application architecture is a first class …

“If you want to unlock the value of your data by generating data-driven values, and you want to do it reliably and resiliently at scale, then you need to consider data mesh."

Zhamak Dehghani is the author of the “Data …

“There’s no leading without following. We are only a leader because somebody is following us."

Jutta Eckstein is a coach, consultant, and trainer who …

“If you want to become a better and more effective leader, then one of your core skills should be coaching skills."

Bob Galen is the President & …

“The most important part about building an experiment-driven culture is to make it safe to fail and to fail in good ways."

Lisi Hocke is an active …

“A way to boost productivity is to create high-quality software from the outset, so that teams can spend less time on rework, both during development and after the release."

Karl Wiegers is the author of “Software …

“Instead of being given a roadmap of features, an empowered team is given a problem to solve and they get to figure out the best way to solve that …

“As a servant leader, your number one job is to serve the people around you. You succeed together with your people, and that’s why serving them first …

🎙️ CELEBRATE the 100th EPISODE by submitting your story/message at techleadjournal.dev/celebrate-100 🎉

“Engineering discipline is the most effective, efficient way of doing high-quality work. If our software …

🎙️ CELEBRATE the 100th EPISODE by submitting your story/message at techleadjournal.dev/celebrate-100 🎉

“Acceptance test is any test that a system must pass in order to be accepted. If you can’t ship a system without …

“Empiricism is at the heart of agility. The fundamental foundation of agility starts with some assertion about value. Every sprint or iteration is really an experiment about value."

Kurt Bittner is the author and editor …

“A highly functional team defines the right environment and has what they need to be the best professionals they can be. And that always includes …

“Reliability is the most important thing. Your users define your reliability, so make sure you’re measuring the right thing. And 100% is out of the question, so pick the right target."

Alex Hidalgo is the Principal …

“You are your greatest asset in your career and in your life. Invest in you personally in all areas of life in order to live your best life."

Jeff Perry is an engineering coach, the founder of More Than Engineering and …

“An engineering manager should make sure that the team has a good balance of delivering things that the business needs with enough capacity to do it …

“We want to write as little software as possible, and we want it to have as much value as possible. If you actually focus on that, it means you have to be close to your customer."

Dave Thomas is the founder & …

“Testing is an activity that happens throughout. It is not a phase that happens at the end. Start thinking about the risks at the very beginning, and how we are going to mitigate those with testing."

Janet Gregory and …

"Pull, don’t push. Don’t tell people what to do. Tell them what results you want and let them figure out how best to achieve the outcome that’s …

“The simplest way to describe craftsmanship is pride of workmanship. It is the mindset that you are working on something important and you are going to do it well."

Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob) is the co-founder of …

“The goal of software is often to sustain an organization. An organization invests in software in order to achieve some goal and hopefully to sustain …

“Observability is a technique for ensuring that you can understand novel problems in your system. Can you understand what’s happening in your system and why, without having to push a new code by slicing and dicing …

“You don’t know what you don’t know. So when you’re learning something, it’s very hard to identify your own knowledge gaps, especially if you’re a programmer and you’re moving from one language to another."

Jeremy …

“We need to consider our system that we built as sociotechnical systems. The system is more than the sum of its parts. It’s a product of their …

“Today, employees want more autonomy, e.g. work-life balance and working from home, and at the same time, they want more social inclusion to get as many authentic insights into the company and the new job as possible."

…

“The route of becoming a technical leader is helping others up-skill and grow. Once you learn that helping others grow is your objective, then you become a leader."

Laurențiu Spilcă is a development lead and trainer at …

“Treating everyone as remote is to keep everyone in mind as having the same level, same equality, the same access to information in communication exchanges between people."

James Stanier is the author of “Effective …

“There’s a substantial difference between building software and then building software for production and then building software for scale."

Mohammed …

“Architecture is context. You can only make the right trade-offs between alternatives if you know the context drivers."

Eltjo Poort is the architecture practice lead at CGI Netherlands with over 30 years of experience …

“Focus on what really matters. If everything matters, then nothing matters. Make sure that what you do is aligned with what really matters."

Peter Stevens and Maria Matarelli are the co-founders of the Personal Agility …

“It is good to improve your processes to make them faster and more efficient. But sometimes what’s even more important is doing the right thing in the first place."

Scott Wlaschin is the author of “Domain Modeling Made …

“Oftentimes it’s not about what’s being said. It’s the fact that there’s not a shared understanding of what’s being said. It’s important that organizations proactively think about how they build a common language and …

“We want to create organizations that can surprise us and do things beyond what we’ve designed them to do, rather than a machine, which only operates in the box that you’ve designed."

Jardena London is a business …

“Interactions with domain experts play a key role in implementing software. You have to make sure that you understand the problem you’re solving. You …

“It’s great if developers have understanding about the domain, because then they can propose better solutions, that’s not necessarily the same …

“Documentation is content marketing. If your docs don’t summarize what your product is actually about, you’re going to have a rough time getting anybody interested."

Meredydd Luff is the founder of Anvil, the platform …

“Because we ship stuff now almost immediately into public facing clients, almost as soon as we’re writing a line of code, we need to be thinking about how we make sure that it’s a secure line of code and it will be …

“It is important to eliminate toil. If you don’t eliminate toil, you won’t have time to fix problems strategically, because strategic initiatives …

“Strategy is what earns. Use the strategic and innovative drivers to help us determine what our architecture needs to be. Architecture has to have a purpose."

Vaughn Vernon is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design …

“Delay design decisions until it’s necessary. Architecture is an art, not a science. Don’t architect for things you don’t know. Your design decisions …

“Successful project managers have a bias for action. They’re out there pushing the project forward all the time and doing all the things that need to …

“Many organizations think in order to be safe, they have to be slow. But the data shows us that the best performers are getting both. And in fact, as speed increases, so too does stability."

Nathen Harvey is the …

“As an architect, your main focus is to influence what’s running in production and to make sure you make the right decisions, so that you have a sustainable product."

Murat Erder is the co-author of “Continuous …

“Time is important for business. We have to model it explicitly. Temporal modeling means that we use time-based artifacts as first modeling citizens."

“The best leaders are those that get things done through other people."

Nick Horney is the author of “VUCA Masters” and founder of Agility …

“API design centers on effective communication, not just between developers, but also communication that combines product thinking, business, and …

“If you’re a generalist, and if you’re good at multiple things, then you have a lot of options. You have a lot of career paths to choose from."

Deepu …

“Coding well with others or being a team player is at the heart of everything we do as developers. Unless you’re coding yourself for a piece of …

“Understanding what makes code readable from a cognitive perspective will help you design better. There are so many areas of programming where knowing something about knowing is just going to make you happier and more …

“Software engineering involves a lot of decisions, and that decision has some trade-offs. We have pros and cons. It’s not like one decision is always …

“DevOps is about creating a collaborative environment between the development team and the operations team, and aligning goals and incentives between …

“The main goal of unit testing is to enable sustainable growth of your software project that enables you to move faster with a more quality code base."

Vladimir Khorikov is the author of “Unit Testing: Principles, …

“Software telemetry is what you use to figure out what your production systems are doing. It’s all about shortening that feedback loop between the user experience and the engineers who are writing the user experience."

…

“Good code should be resilient to bugs. It should make it easier to do the changes that you want to the system. Some refactoring could make it harder …

“Decide where it is you’re going and what kind of career you need to live the life you want and aim for that really deliberately. Because if you don’t know where you’re going, then you never will get there."

Don Jones …

“Going from development to management is not a promotion. It’s an entirely new career. And there is normally a lack of proper guidance for that."

Alvaro Moya is the founder of Lidr, a community that prepares and …

“The whole point of microservices and adopting microservices is not to have microservices. The goal is to improve the software delivery key metrics, …

“Seriously good software is not just software that works. It is not just software that satisfies its functional requirements, so it does the right thing, but it also does it in the right way."

Marco Faella is an …

“The most important thing is to make it easy for people to contribute. And the second thing is to have as many people as possible. For that, you build a community, and decide what people you want in your community."

…

“The cloud is a change in operating model. It isn’t IT procurement. If you don’t change the way your organization works, the cloud is going to look much more like another data center.“

Gregor Hohpe is the author of …

“Kanban is a flow strategy that helps you to optimize the flow of value through your value streams from ideation to customer."

Dimitar Karaivanov is a Lean-thinker, a Kanban practitioner, and the CEO and co-founder of …

“A lot of engineers are unhappy and a lot of that has to do with not being able to control their environment, or even articulate what they want to …

“Micro-frontends are representations of business subdomains. We should differentiate them from components, because components are solving technical …

“Business agility is a set of organizational capabilities, behaviors, and ways of working that afford your business the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose, no matter what the future brings."

…

“A lot of us in clinical practice always thought of technology as a tool. Today, technology has become not just a “what”, but it’s become a “how”. …

“Practices and principles are necessary and useful, but they should be informed by what the constraints are in the first place. We need to …

“Hybrid work is here to stay. It is going to continue. But we want to make sure that it comes in a way that’s equitable and everyone gets to experience the benefits of it."

Dr. Jenna Butler is a Visiting Research Fellow …

“Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on the system in order to increase your confidence that the system will survive difficult …

“Back when work from home became suddenly virtually overnight, it was all about enabling the business to continue. A lot of this move was rushed out of necessity, but the focus was on speed. The focus was not on …

“By and large, the way people put together the delivery process is by gut and instinct. The next step up from there is to use the data that comes out of your system to help you make the right decisions. When I say …

“Technology is really impacting our daily life, sometimes without us knowing, and it’s important that we start understanding or relearning what is …

“Tech Capital is about creating something that enables things that weren’t possible before, that genuinely helps the business and enables other people in your organization, and those are the kind of stuffs that …

“Lean Inception is about aligning a group of people to be successful. It’s about aligning the vision and the MVP from three different angles: the …

“A high-performing team is one that gets to spend almost all of their time solving interesting problems that move the business forward. Not doing a …

“One of the technological opportunities that we have taken during the pandemic has been transforming the mindset to thinking on products, to thinking …

“Developer productivity is not lines of code written. It’s not the number of commits. It has to do with the ultimate problem you’re solving and the …

“Simplicity is an experience that makes things easy for users that leaves positive emotions."

Jin Kang Møller is an award-winning customer experience strategist, design practitioner, and the author of “The Simplicity …

“The CIO is a person who uses IT to facilitate and enable a company so that it becomes more competitive, and it becomes more profitable."

Alex Siow …

“Your digital agenda is your business agenda. You got to be very deliberate and intentional about your transformation journey. You do it because it’s the right thing to do, and you got to figure out what is that right …

“Be the supply to the unmet demand. Things that you could make a huge difference on if only you just go and do it. You don’t need to seek permission. …

“If a user is even reading documentation that a technical writer has produced, they’re probably already annoyed."

Helen Scott is a technical writer and Java Developer Advocate at JetBrains. In this episode, we discussed …

“The output of a manager is the output of the manager’s team plus the output of the organization that they influence."

James Stanier is the SVP Engineering at Brandwatch and author of “Become an Effective Software …

“I truly believe that what set the superstars or people who are very successful is the ability to tell to themselves to quit. Winners quit fast and …

"Most people confuse a technical capability with technology. Ultimately, technology is a technical capability plus the human outcome that it creates."

“When I think about well-crafted software, it’s code that we are not scared to change. The code clearly specifies what it does. When we change one part of it, don’t break the other. You always feel that you are in …

“When you recruit an engineer on your team, you actually want to make sure from their first day on, you give them the smoothest entry into your company and help them and assist them in as many ways as you can to become …

“I always deliver myself against these four things: you should stay true to learning; be curious, understand what is going on; optimize for people, …

“A retrospective is a time set aside where you are looking at what has happened, you’re appreciating what happened, and you’re learning from what happened. And then you improve the ways of how you’re doing things."

Aino …

“Programmers have to come out of their cubicles. Innovative software development doesn’t happen with one person in a cubicle with great ideas. Because it’s not just even about code. Anybody can write code. It’s about …

“The most important thing we can do in order to get whatever success we want—build the best product you can. Invest all your energy in making the …

“With machines, you know there are limitations. You can’t go beyond that. You have to upgrade your machines. Or the technology changes. But with …

“What I come to realize is that technology doesn’t move that fast. The fundamentals are roughly the same. It’s the fact that we don’t necessarily …

“Asynchronous communication promotes flow. And flow is generally what we’re all looking for. Not only because it’s more productive. Not only it’s because it’s within this state that we produce the best work. It’s also …

“Having the conversation within the business, the data science teams, and the technology teams about what problems are you trying to solve? What can …

“The goal of your resume is to get a recruiter call. It’s a binary yes or no. That is the goal. As soon as you have your recruiter call, your resume doesn’t really matter that much."

Gergely is a seasoned software …

“Organizations should never set up a central digital transformation office. It should be owned by everybody in the organization. It’s not a CIO’s …

“Goal on the behaviors that matter. Don’t goal on your vanity metrics. Figure out what it is that, not just works for your product, but also for you as an individual."

Crystal Widjaja is a startup growth advisor and a …

“You can run an organization where you communicate clearly, and you treat people fairly, and you try to set people up for success. I have seen it work, and I can make that happen, and I remember that it is possible."

…

“Courage needs to be emphasized even more in software development context. That’s related with respect. We cannot expect the developers will be courageous, to tell the truth, to have integrity, unless the organization, …

“As a leader, it’s not your responsibility to do. It’s your responsibility to teach and help your team to level up. Your job is to level up your team, so that you have a team of people who can do it better and faster."

…

“A Tech Lead is a person with a technical background, typically an engineer who is leading a team and particularly responsible and accountable for …

“There is no permanent failure and there is no guarantee of success either. What you define as success, what you define as failure is just a definition."

Sau Sheong is the CEO of SP Digital, an energytech company, part …

“Continuous Integration is when you are integrating with the other developers on the code base as soon as possible. Continuous Delivery is when your code is in a deployable state and functionally correct."

In this …

“The thing about becoming a Tech Influencer is, content is Queen and consistency, quality and value matter. That’s the trifecta of creating content that sticks."

In this episode, I had a fun conversation with Stephanie …

"With Infrastructure as Code, you’re not trying to kind of reverse engineer or understand what ended up somehow onto each system, you’re actually saying, this is how the system is built and because it’s built from that …

"With the kind of security breaches and attacks that we are witnessing in this era, it becomes of prior importance that we prioritize security at the top."

In this episode, I am joined by Neha Malhotra who has recently …

“Knowing and understanding are very different things. Unless I practice it along with good guidance, I may not increase my understanding."

There are several Agile misconceptions in the industry lately. It has even come …

Hear from Singapore's prominent community builder, Michael Cheng, on how to contribute to communities, and learn more about his latest passion for mentoring junior developers.

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“Rather than being passive about it, …

"Leading others is leading yourself first. That's a very big work of self awareness, and you should always do that."

Jerome Poudevigne is a serial …

"Great technical leadership requires more than just great coding skills. It requires a variety of other skills that are not well-defined."

In this trailer episode, your host Henry Suryawirawan explains why he created …