🎓 CTO Craft Learn, Remote, Onboarding, Managing Contractors, Building Trust, GitOps, Strangler Fig: TMW #192 by CTO Craft
Hello there!
And.. It's a wrap! CTO Craft Con: the People One happened last Tuesday to Thursday, with a little under 500 participants, 35 amazing speakers - the feedback has been incredible, and engagement in the chat during the talks was amazing. We'll definitely be doing it again, so watch this space for 2021... 😁
We announced CTO Craft Learn at the event - this is a new initiative we're building out at the moment, including Masters, self-paced courses on a variety of engineering and leadership topics, and Labs, in-depth instructor-led workshops. Learn will launch in Feb 2021, but we're already taking pre-orders at an early-bird price, so if you're interested in getting involved, check it out now:
🎓 CTO Craft Learn - Engineering Leadership Courses and Workshops - early-bird pricing now active
Our CTO Craft Bytes series will kick off again in early January, and we'll be looking for panelists and subject ideas. If there's anything or anyone you'd like to hear from in particular, let us know
And on to the content - see you next week!
Andy @ CTO Craft
Read of the Week
From Zero to CTO - Meet Sushma Nallapeta
VP and Head of Engineering at Apartment List, Sushma Nallapeta discusses her leadership journey and vision for diversity & inclusion in tech.
The State of the Octoverse - 2020
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.
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Culture & People
We're Never Going Back
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.
Owning your onboarding (especially in remote work)
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.
How to Manage Contractors and Freelancers to Bring out their Best
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.
The tech tribe of mentors
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 & Self-management
Becoming a Technical Leader
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!)
5 leadership tactics that build trust
“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.
Agile Leadership — A Brief Overview of Concepts and Ideas
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.
Leading the company of tomorrow with Collaborative Leadership!
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.
Trust, Ownership, and Vision: Necessary Conditions for Great Team Performance
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.
Agile, Engineering & Product
GitOps: It’s the cloud-native way
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
4 Key Flow Metrics and how to use them in Scrum's events
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 in Product Management
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.
Under the hood of a data-intensive application
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.
Migrating a Monolith towards Microservices with the Strangler Fig Pattern
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.
What Else?
No more free work from Marak - Pay Me or Fork This #1046
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?"
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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!
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Have an amazing week!
Andy