Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #141
Hi all - hope the week has begun well!
We’re currently planning CTO Craft Christmas drinks in London UK - if you’d like to come along, here’s a Doodle poll we’re using to coordinate. Venue TBC, but it’ll be somewhere central:
https://doodle.com/poll/fgf8m28dmhpeiht9
Hope to see you there!
If you're interested in chatting about my 1:1 CTO Coaching or Mentoring, please drop me a line by replying to this email - I have some slots opening in the coming weeks.
As always, if you find something you think should be in the next TMW, drop me a reply to this email
Andy
Curated by Andy Skipper, founder of CTO Craft and mentor and coach to CTOs, VPs of Engineering and other technology leaders around world
Reads of the Week - On Mentoring
How to Be a Career-Changing Mentor — 25 Tips From The Best Mentors We Know
In the fall of 2016, the First Round team launched our first mentorship pairing effort as a small experiment, with just a few dozen mentors and mentees pulled from across our community.
How To Be A Good Software Engineer Mentor
Mentoring is one of the best ways to help junior developers grow their skills. As a mid-level or senior developer, it's up to you to decide what kind of mentor you want to be. The most important thing to keep in mind as a mentor is that it's not about you.
Culture & People
Frame the Work For Safety and Learning
To get people on the same page, with common goals and a shared appreciation for what they’re up against, you must master the essential leadership skill of framing the work. The skill of framing the work starts with a basic appreciation of the power of cognitive frames.
Starting an Engineering Management Book Club
For the last several months some coworkers and I have been running an engineering management book club at work. It’s awesome.
A guide to distributed teams
All teams past a certain size become distributed, whether across rooms, floors, buildings, cities, or continents. But tech is only starting to explore and invest in remote workplaces, which means that, as an industry, we don’t really know what success looks like.
Get Your (Arti)facts Right — Eight Examples of Developer-Driven Employer Branding Content
Medi Gwosdz is a Content Writer at Stack Overflow Talent. Based in the London offices she writes all kinds of blog articles and guides to help developers advance their careers – and to help companies find developers.
Six Tech Recruiting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) You Need to Measure
Medi Gwosdz is a Content Writer at Stack Overflow Talent. Based in the London offices she writes all kinds of blog articles and guides to help developers advance their careers – and to help companies find developers.
Leadership & Self-management
The path to management
Throughout high school and college, I worked as a tutor, teaching assistant, and mentor, and discovered that I loved helping people realize their own potential and finding groups of people who worked well together.
8 Ways to Flip Your Fear of Conflict
In the past, 99U has tackled arguments by digging into how to safely bring sparring into shoptalk and mediation into meetings. But, here’s the thing: it’s 2019. Disagreement is our reality.
Failing 15% of the time is the best way to learn, say scientists
When learning something new, people naturally look to challenge themselves but the task should be too easy or too difficult, lest they get bored or give up. Despite a long history of research, it is unclear why particular difficulty levels might be best for learning.
Why Groups Struggle to Solve Problems Together
Why are so many meetings so unproductive? But if we want an accurate, rather than merely cathartic answer to the question, we’d be wise to consider Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by misunderstanding.
Want an Awesome Team? Start With You.
Want an easy tool to help you start building the best team of your life? That’s what the Team Transformation Canvas is: a practical worksheet to help you and your teammates discover the best in each other and put it into action.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Estimation 101 – A Short Guide
Estimation is hard to get right. There’s also an inherent degree of inaccuracy based on the information to hand. Unfortunately, it is something that we’re frequently asked to do for a number of reasons:
Non-functional Requirements and OPAQ
Non-functional requirements (NFR’s) are key to good software. They are frequently overlooked in companies and result in software that may function correctly, but are problematic operationally and can result in total failures.
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.
Improving Coding Standards and Quality
Coding Standards are often thought of as style guides, however coding standards should be more than merely a style guide. Beyond just style, I believe standards should encompass everything that is used to improve code quality and reliability.
What Else?
Increment: Teams
This issue of Increment offers structural, organizational, and personal approaches to building empathy, fostering collaboration, and growing productivity.
That’s it!
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Have an amazing week!