Sep 14, 2020

Tech Manager Weekly by CTO Craft - Issue #180

By Andy @ CTO Craft • Issue #180 • View online

Salut! Hope you’ve had a great weekend

We’re back this Friday with another Bytes panel event, this time with Pat Kua, Sally Lait and Sarah Hale, in conversation with ImpactX Capital’s CTO in Residence Ezechi Britton on the topic of team building and management in a post-COVID world. Get your tickets here:

📆 CTO Craft Bytes - Hiring & Managing Engineering Teams in a Post-COVID World - Fri, 18 September 2020 12:30 – 13:30 BST

You can see the recording of last Friday’s CFO<>CTO chat on our Crowdcast page here, which was hosted by Guy Hutchinson, one of the founders of the Startup CFO group, a very active community of CFO’s operating in tech start-ups predominantly in the UK. The group is the only CFO community run by CFO’s for CFO’s and has become one of the leading peer-to-peer finance networks. If you think the Finance person in your organisation ought to be a member, please send them to startupcfo.tech where they can submit their interest.

There are still a few places in the next Mentoring Circle, due to start in late September - if you’d like to know more, drop us a line!

Thanks as always to our Headline Partner, Amazon Web Services - if you’re interested in partnering, drop us a line!

Until next time

Andy @ CTO Craft

Reads of the Week

How developers feel about working from home - a full report

“Based on the reasons shared by respondents, developers seem to feel higher levels of autonomy and freedom when they have a remote option because they have more control over their time and where they work. The second most mentioned reason for wanting remote work when choosing a job is a decrease in time spent commuting.”

An excellent 30-page report from an extensive survey of developers adapting to the new normal…

www.dropbox.com • Share

Collaboration and the Fractal Organization

Many of you have never heard of fractal organizations, I hadn’t until I talked to a colleague working on the Hyper-loop project, which she described as a “fractal organization".

medium.com • Share

From our Partners

Enable the internet of (protected) things - from AWS

Read the AWS IoT guide to learn proven IoT security best practices, including how to keep even the largest and most diverse connected device fleet secure, authentication, encryption, continuous monitoring, and other ways to protect data in transit or at rest, as well as specific security best practices across all verticals

pages.awscloud.com • Share

🥝 🥝 If you’re interested in seeing our Partnership Opportunities, drop a reply to this email! 🥝 🥝

Culture & People

GitLab’s radical vision for the future of remote work

As 2020’s experiment with working from home turns into something more permanent, GitLab—the world’s largest all-remote company—offers a glimpse of what’s ahead, for better or worse.

www.fastcompany.com • Share

Workshop by Design Canvas: Making Collaboration Work

The heart of successful product management and product development is a collaborating community of team members operating with shared goals, mutual trust, and learning mechanisms for evolving products and processes.

medium.com • Share

Do engineering managers need to write code?

One of the biggest difficulties in transitioning from a software developer to a manager is coming to terms with the realisation that producing code is no longer your primary objective. Chances are, while you were a software developer, writing code was something that energised you.

medium.com • Share

Empowering Teams: To High Performance And Excellence

How can we transform from the command and control style to leveraging the power of self-direction that energizes and engages people? Empowering teams by giving up control is not easy.

www.techtello.com • Share

The One Essential Skill of an Exceptional Engineering Manager

According to the Global Developer Population and Demographic Study conducted by Evans Data Corporation, there are over 22 million developers worldwide. This figure is expected to rise to 26 million in 2022. So. Many. Developers.

medium.com • Share

Leadership & Self-management

Who do I delegate to? A CTO's guide to developing leaders

Discover how to identify, nurture and delegate to natural leaders within your team in three stages - a must-have CTO’s guide.

ctocraft.com • Share

Bucketing your time

This article is part of a series on managing managers. Life as an IC, or as a manager of ICs, usually follows a predictable cadence. Perhaps you plan your time and your activities around fixed periods such as sprints.

www.theengineeringmanager.com • Share

A Practical Approach to Engineering Leadership

In my previous post on the new engineering leadership skills needed in a devops world, I called for a more systematic approach to developing leadership capabilities in engineering. But I gave no answers.

stuff.greger.io • Share

The surprising traits of good remote leaders

Fifteen years ago, Steven Charlier, chair of management at Georgia Southern University in the US, had a hunch that in-person charisma and leadership skills don’t translate virtually. “Before I became an academic, I worked for IBM for a number of years on a lot of virtual teams,” he says.

www.bbc.com • Share

Seven Transformations of Leadership

Every company needs transformational leaders—those who spearhead changes that elevate profitability, expand market share, and change the rules of the game in their industry. But few executives understand the unique strengths needed to become such a leader.

hbr.org • Share

Agile, Engineering & Product

A Primer on Algorithms and Bias

The growing influence of algorithms on our lives means we owe it to ourselves to better understand what they are and how they work. Understanding how the data we use to inform algorithms influences the results they give can help us avoid biases and make better decisions.

fs.blog • Share

The Automated CIO

I previously wrote a bit about our internal infrastructure in my post on The Art of Automation. This post is going to go into details about our automated Chief Infrastructure Officer (CIO). I joke so much that I automated our CIO that I even named the repo holding the code for cio.

blog.jessfraz.com • Share

What is Threat Modeling and GitHub's Process

At GitHub, we spend a lot of time thinking about and building secure products—and one key facet of that is threat modeling. This practice involves bringing security and engineering teams together to discuss systems, ultimately generating action items that improve the security of the system.

github.blog • Share

Reading Code is a Skill

I’m inspired to write this post because Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. Of course a more accurate statement would be “I disagree with some aspects of what someone on the internet said, even though they have an entirely valid point of view”. But that’s less catchy.

trishagee.com • Share

What Else?

Scientists Tested Out the World’s Largest Digital Camera on a Piece of Broccoli

Soon, it’ll photograph the cosmos. But first, scientists used it to snap a highly-detailed picture of an ordinary vegetable Scientists building the world’s largest digital camera have captured the highest resolution images ever taken in a single shot, reports Mike Wall for Space.com.

www.smithsonianmag.com • Share

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

Please do remember to share this link if you know of anyone who’d like to receive TMW:

http://www.techmanagerweekly.com

Have an amazing week!

Andy