🥯 Check-ins, Criticism vs Praise, Reorgs, Being a Senior Leader, Leading vs Lagging, Distributed SQLite: TMW #283 by CTO Craft

Hello again! Hope you've had a good weekend

We're still hard at work plotting the agenda for CTO Craft Con in November, and take my word for it, it's going to be absolutely amazing. The keynote speakers will be announced very shortly, and you'll definitely recognise them... Very excited!

You can pick up your early-bird ticket here:

CTO Craft Con Winter 2022 - November 14th - 16th

On with the links - see you next week!

Andy @ CTO Craft

Announcing our November CTO Craft Conference 2022!

We’re already deep into planning for our next CTO Craft Conference in November 2022, and here’s a hint of what we’ll be focusing on and what’s new...

Reads of the Week

Making a Case for the Humble Check-In Round

Small shifts can have big impacts. One of the first shifts clients and colleagues alike encounter when they work with The Ready is extremely small; it’s the check-in round, a moment taken at the top of every meeting to ask a question — something like “What has your attention right now?” or “What’s your best unsolicited recommendation?” — that everyone answers in a round.

Being-Doing Balance over Work-Life Balance

The term work-life balance is used all the time when people describe their jobs. Shitty work life balance usually means you’re expected to be available all the time, work nights and weekends on top of regular work hours, with no regard for your personal commitments.

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About our Sponsors

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Culture & People

Why criticism lasts longer than praise

As children we are often told that sticks and stones can break bones, but words can never hurt. Yet with the benefit of experience, adults understand that this old proverb is far from true – while physical injuries can take a matter of weeks to heal, negative comments can scar us for a lifetime.

Four Ideas to Know When Someone is Ready for Leadership or Management

We're pretty good at knowing when someone is a good fit for a technical role. But how do we know when someone is ready for technical leadership or management? That's a lot more difficult, and that's because leadership or management—at any level—is a different job than working in the technology.

Engineering Your Team Culture

For many years, I saw team culture as something to work in and not something to work on. For example, I noticed some of the teams that I worked with were excited to learn new technologies while other teams were eager to keep the status quo.

The Role of Reorgs in Organizational Change

A reorg is one of the most common interventions leaders turn to for organizational change, and often the first: everything from adding, merging, or breaking teams apart to rethinking how whole organizations are structured

How I structure my teams for growth

Having worked in a number of scale-ups in the last 10 years, there are a few principles I have adopted for scaling Tech and Product teams. The first one, is to organize teams to be cross-functional.

Leadership & Self-management

How to Be a Senior Leader

If you want to get promoted as a manager, or are considering whether to promote someone on your team, check out our guide on how to be a senior leader at a fast-growing company.

Insights For Making Better Decisions

Celebrated research psychologist Gary Klein has spent nearly 50 years studying how and why people make the decisions they do.

How to Give Your Boss Bad News: Avoid This Mistake and What to Do Instead

You’ve got to give your boss bad news. But the timing isn’t great–for you or for them. The restructure. The uncertainty. The promotion that’s right around the corner.  Maybe it’s just not a great time to rock the boat.

Why You Should View Your Mistakes as ‘Misses’

These seven categories of engineering management are based on Ian's own software-engineering experience, which includes 10 years at Amazon and are designed to help managers successfully direct, satisfy and retain employees, as well as maintain a healthy company culture.

Transitioning from CTO to founder

Roughly 18 months ago I took the jump of leaving my CTO job managing 600 engineers to start Echoes HQ, my first company as a founder. This post is a personal reflection of what I've learned and what surprised me in that transition, in no particular order.

Agile, Engineering & Product

What are leading and lagging indicators?

Last week I wrote some thoughts on managing my energy better at work, through the lens of leading and lagging indicators. When I was writing that post—judging by the amount of times I had to check and recheck the definitions—I realised that I often get them muddled up.

Turning SQLite into a distributed database

mvSQLite is the open-source, SQLite-compatible distributed database. We decoupled SQLite's storage layer onto FoundationDB to offer massive yet "bottomless" scalability, point-in-time reads, and the strictest level of consistency.

"Transformer-Like" Robots Are Replacing Humans in Construction

A Japanese robotics startup named Jinki Ittai has introduced a giant humanoid robot which is designed to perform construction tasks.

How to Make Good Code Reviews Better

I have been doing day-to-day code reviews for over a decade now. The benefits of code reviews are plenty: someone spot checks your work for errors, they get to learn from your solution, and the collaboration helps to improve the organization’s overall approach to tooling and automation.

That’s it!

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https://ctocraft.com/community

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Have an amazing week!

Andy