🎓 CTO Craft Learn, Remote, Onboarding, Managing Contractors, Building Trust, GitOps, Strangler Fig: TMW #192 by CTO Craft

VP and Head of Engineering at Apartment List, Sushma Nallapeta discusses her leadership journey and vision for diversity & inclusion in tech.

Over the past year, 10M new developers joined the GitHub community, contributing to 44M+ repositories across every continent on earth. Behind the world’s code is a global and growing team of contributors, and 80% of them are contributing from outside the US.

Prioritising your needs: scalability assessment, product discovery, and improvement workshops.

In month one, two, three, or even maybe four of the pandemic, it was a foregone conclusion that once this whole thing was over, we would go right back to the office. Then, after people moved around, spent more time with family, set up their home offices, became adept at matching sweatpants with a presentable top, and got used to their 15-second commutes, that conclusion seems less foregone.

Career moves like starting a new role are challenging, can often be unnerving, and for sure requires leveling up. A few months back, I accepted an offer with another business group at Intel.

Do you know how to manage contractors? Have you had freelancers on your teams? In an ideal world maybe we’d all have only full time employees who all work closely with us long term. However, in reality, there are a variety of reasons why you may mix in contractors and freelancers to your team.

Throughout my career, I have gained many valuable insights from my mentors. The value of mentorship has been a driving force for my constant advocacy for it and my involvement in initiatives aligning with this purpose.

Leadership is a set of competencies that can be learned. A search online will present lists of the top N traits of leaders (where N is any number from 5 to 101!)

“It’s really not about being seen as the person in charge. It’s about learning how to communicate in a way that other people trust.” 4 minute ReadYou never master the art of leadership.

I recently started aggregating my notes, links, and references related to agile leadership to understand better what it — in the context of an agile transition — may look like. In the end, becoming agile is not the goal of a transition; surviving as an organization is.

Managing a team, or even a whole organization, is definitely not a walk in the park. Leaders face a lot of challenges that are related to new fields in company management.

Three rivers – Trust, Ownership, and Vision – flow and converge into a confluence that helps create the necessary conditions for high performance, self-managing teams. Teams that adapt quickly to what their customers want. Teams that deliver great business value at a sustainable pace.

Most of the approaches introduced in the software development space are designed to make life easier for developers, but what about operations? DevOps was designed to make development and operation systems work better together, and as more teams successfully adopt DevOps, there is an opportunity to

The number of work items started but not finished (according to the Scrum Team’s definition of “Workflow”). Note the difference between WIP and the WIP Limit. The WIP Limit is a policy which the Scrum Team uses as a “constraint” to help them shape the flow of work.

OKRs—objectives and key results—have experienced a renewed popularity in recent years. Consequently, I am regularly asked if and how OKRs can be applied in product management. This article shares my thoughts. OKRs are a method for setting and tracking goals.

Data is one of the most important assets right now and it is established that ‘The Future is Data-Driven’. Some time back, I started reading the brilliant book ‘Designing Data-Intensive Applications’ by Martin Kleppman.

ScholarPack has migrated away from its monolith backend using a Strangler Fig pattern. They applied incremental development and continuous delivery to target customers’ needs, in the meanwhile strangling their monolith.

Andy says: “An interesting situation - open source contributor Marak has had enough of dedicating his time to building libraries and tools that large, profit-making entities use for free. What are your thoughts? Might this be an impending trend?”