🦑 Happiness, Toxic Cultures, Better Meetings, Mesoamerican Wizards(?), Feedback, Golden Signals, SBOMs: TMW #301 by CTO Craft
Hello folks! Welcome to the week
Are you happy? Is your team happy? What is happiness, anyway, and how important is the pursuit of it? James Conroy-Finn will be digging into what happiness actually means in our Bytes session this Friday with Anna Dick. If you'd like to learn how refreshing your understanding of what makes us all tick, and learn some ways to use it to affect the satisfaction levels and performance of your team, tune in or catch the recording on our Youtube channel.
There's still time to pick up early-bird tickets for CTO Craft Con in a few weeks, but not much! Jump in to secure your place before the prices go up... Also, don't miss our Spotlight Q&A with Con speaker and Circle member Frankie Nicoletti below.
On with the show - see you on Thursday
Andy @ CTO Craft
CTO Craft Con Winter 2022 - A Conference for CTOs, by CTOs
Grab a front-row seat to the most in-depth discussions of what it means to be a senior leader in a technology organisation, how to build a solid foundation with other C-level leaders, how to ensure alignment between engineering and other functions and how to keep you and your team’s skills sharp. November 14 - 16 2022
Spotlight Q&A with VP of Engineering at SoLo Funds, Frankie Nicoletti
Frankie Nicoletti, senior engineering leader, speaker, leadership coach and competitive powerlifter talks about debugging people problems.
CTO Craft Bytes
Philosophy of Happiness, Fri 28 Oct 2022 at 12:30 BST
With James Conroy-Finn, former CTO at Listora, Drest, BCG Digital Ventures and more
High-performing teams are made up of highly capable individuals fortunate enough to have climbed a hierarchy of needs. From the physiological through to the cognitive and aesthetic, we will explore the idea that innovation and effective collaboration are predicated on the healthy pursuit of happiness.
Grab your tickets now!
Reads of the Week
How to Fix a Toxic Culture
To address toxicity in the workplace, research shows there are three critical drivers companies should focus on: leadership, social norms, and work design. More than 90% of North American CEOs and CFOs believe that improving their corporate culture would boost financial performance.
From our Sponsors
How to invest in employees: Find out in this free report - from O'Reilly
Everyone knows you need to invest in your employees—particularly in tight labor markets like these. But how? This report shows you ways to implement and scale training across your organization to get outstanding results with the teams you have.
Data Strategy Head to Head: Which solutions are best for your business? - from 101 Ways
When you last added a new data source into your organisation how did it go? If it was painful, slow and clunky then it's a sure sign you need to consider your data strategy. In the latest blog post from tech consultancy 101 Ways, they explore the pros and cons of data warehousing, data lakes and data mesh!
About our Sponsors
Thanks as always to the amazing sponsors helping CTO Craft bring you resources like this newsletter, our events, community and more:
AWS, Albany Partners, Code Climate, Google Cloud, iTechArt, Jellyfish, LinearB, Lohika, 101 Ways, O’Reilly, PGS Software, Pentalog, Skiller Whale, Steamhaus, Swarmia, YLD
Culture & People
What Attracts Top Tech Talent?
Right now companies are having a tough time finding, hiring, and keeping the top technical talent they need to keep their businesses running and growing.
Two Development Team Configurations I Lobby Against
Product management doesn’t run Engineering; Engineering runs Engineering. And at least in public, Engineering and Product leadership need to be shoulder-to-shoulder, actively supporting each other at every turn. But there are some engineering team configurations that I see as problematic.
Make Meetings Work
Meetings have never been so unpopular. Who hasn’t sat in an uncomfortable chair watching a tedious Powerpoint as you think of all the things you could be doing instead? And on Zoom they can be even worse…
Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards
Some call them mobile engineers, but their true name is a complicated Nahuatl word that translates to “those who have tamed the black smoke mirrors.” They are the ones who have mastered the dark energies at work in the Other World. They are the ones who allow us all to See.
Leadership & Self-management
Skyrocket your productivity with the 'touch it once' rule
When work is coming at you from all directions, it's easy to push even the simplest tasks aside. You may find yourself repeatedly looking at the same paperwork or email and promising to get to it later.
Why Some Feedback Hurts (and What To Do About It)
"Feedback is a gift," or so we're told, and yet sometimes that "gift" is quite painful to receive. This is a theme in my work with leaders, who routinely find themselves the subject of sharp criticism in company surveys, 360 reports, Glassdoor reviews, and social media, among other places.
Good Managers Write Good
In my time observing managers, one observation seems to repeat again and again: good managers write well, and bad managers write poorly. In fact, the best managers I’ve ever seen were not just good writers, they were terrific.
Agile, Engineering & Product
What are the four Golden Signals?
When it comes to building reliable and scalable software, few organizations have as much authority and expertise as Google. Their Site Reliability Engineering Handbook, first published in 2016, details their practices to maintain reliability as Google scaled.
Cypress vs Playwright - which JavaScript testing framework is better?
Cypress and Playwright have done their homework right, and are currently the top frameworks that have created ideal tools for test implementation. Cypress is a JavaScript-based tool built for frontend testing. Designed to be developer friendly, it operates directly in the browser.
SBOMs: An Overhyped Concept That Won't Secure Your Software Supply Chain
With Executive Order 14028, a large regulatory push toward mandating the production of a software bill of materials (SBOM) began. As this new buzzword spreads, you'd think it was a miracle cure for securing the software supply chain.
That’s it!
If you’d like to be considered for the free CTO Craft Community, fill in your details here, and we’ll be in touch!
https://ctocraft.com/community
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Have an amazing week!
Andy