🥐 Zero to CTO, Developer Happiness, Manager vs Maker OKRs, Building Trust, Alignment, Backlogs: TMW #196 by CTO Craft
Happy new year!! Here's to an amazing 2021 - we've all earned it, I think
We're hitting the ground running here at CTO Craft, with a new series of Bytes events (more to come on that next week), as well as the roll-out of our CTO Craft Labs workshops. If you'd like to take a look, head here for some more info and an early-bird discount:
We've been running our Zero to CTO blog series for over two years now, with some amazing leaders - here are some of the most popular interviews over the last year:
- Emanuele Blanco, CTO at Moneyfarm
- Aubrey Stearn, Executive Director of Software Engineering at JPMorgan Chase
- Emily Rigby, Head of Engineering at OVO Energy
- Julie-Laure Mikulskis, Head of Technology at YLD
- Pat Kua, CTO, Speaker and Tech Lead Mentor
- Marta Jasinska, CTO at Bloom & Wild
Have a great week - see you soon!
Andy @ CTO Craft
Reads of the Week
Developer Happiness Index: Global Insights
With this report, we sought to better understand developer happiness and well-being by exploring four key factors: career, quality of life, social freedoms and community.
About our Partners
A huge, huge thanks to our partners for supporting CTO Craft Con 2020 - you’re all amazing!
Amazon Web Services, The Scale Factory, YLD, LinearB, Albany Partners, Skiller Whale, iTechArt Group and PGS Software
🥝 🥝 If you’re interested in seeing our Partnership Opportunities, drop a reply to this email! 🥝 🥝
Culture & People
The secret of highly productive engineering teams
Ever thought about what makes some engineering teams highly productive as compared to others? What such teams do differently than others? Can it be due to difference in skills of engineers in different teams?
How to Host Better Team Meetings
With the rise of online events and Zoom meetings, small and big teams alike are more than familiar with the tribulations of online meetings.
Working Remotely as a High-Performance Engineering Team at Moonpig
In this article I will talk about how a high-performance engineering team at Moonpig adapted to a remote working environment, whilst they improved their ways of working, and continued to deliver on improving the experience we provide to our customers.
Manager OKRs, Maker OKRs: How Early Stage Startups Should Think About Goal-Setting
Google’s internal management approach has sustained and scaled pretty impressively over the years. Quantitative goal-setting, setting stretch targets — these principles are as evident in the 2020s as they were when I arrived in 2003.
Leadership & Self-management
7 Leadership Strategies that Build Trust with Your Remote Team
Moreover, numerous studies have found that trust is critical to team success. And, this is most true as remote managers are struggling with trust issues during COVID-10. Thankfully, you can use the following 7 strategies to turn this around.
The Email That Got Me Promoted to CTO
Moving up the ranks as an engineer is something that many accomplish. From the time I was nine years old, I wanted to be at the top of the technical ladder. My father gave me my first few lessons on…
Research: Women Are Better Leaders During a Crisis
There has been a lot said about how women have done a better job leading during the Covid-19 crisis than men. According to an analysis of 360-degree assessments conducted between March and June of this year, women were rated by those who work with them as more effective.
Alignment
Should you work hard? Depending on your definition of "hard," it's a controversial question. Let's assume a baseline level of hardness is roughly 40 hours per week of mostly focused work.
Agile, Engineering & Product
Architecture Ownership Patterns for Team Topologies. Part 2: Single Team Patterns
The systems we build are composed of many pieces. From mobile apps, to domains, to user journeys. How should we slice up the system and divide responsibilities among teams in our organisation?
Why Software Development is Hard
There’s this idea that having better programming languages will make software development much easier and more productive. That no doubt used to be true, back when assembly or Fortran came along.
Mary Poppendieck on Why You Should Just Burn Your Backlog
Co-author of the “Lean Software Development,” Mary Poppendieck warned attendees of Agile Tour London in an end of day lean coffee that backlogs are a sign of an inefficient team. But that’s OK.
Dev methodology mostly doesn’t matter (so just make up your own)
I worked as a developer using Waterfall for exactly 9 months. I was 22 years old and it was my first programmer job and first corporate environment. This place was old school. Like suit-wearing, personal cubicle type old school.
Self-documenting Architecture
One of the biggest time costs in software development is understanding how a system works. And the problem may be growing. Systems are getting more complex yet our ability to understand them doesn’t seem to be growing at the same rate.
What Else?
TabFS
TabFS is a browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer. Each of your open tabs is mapped to a folder.
That’s it!
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Have an amazing week!
Andy