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7 min read

🌷 Developer Identity, Leadership Laws, Truth Seeking, OKRs for Agents, Data Modernisation, Unclenching: TMW #501

Are you joining us in Amsterdam this week?
🧑‍🏫
This week's TMW is sponsored by Okta and Auth0 - platforms to secure all types of identity from AI agents to your customers, employees, and partners.

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

CTO Craft Con comes to Amsterdam!

This week: CTO Craft Con: Europe comes to Amsterdam!

The whole team here at CTO Craft is incredibly excited to be bringing our incredible community conference to the Netherlands for the first time this week, where almost 300 leaders from right across Europe will be joining us for two days of learning, networking and building confidence.

On stage will be experts like Raffi Krikorian, CTO at Mozilla, Sarah Abrantes, VP Eng at Adyen, Nidhi Sharma, Head of Eng at Just Eat Takeaway and a keynote from the amazing Randy Shoup, SVP Eng at Circle CI. Away from the stage, there are roundtables focused on AI in the SDLC, reclaiming your time and engineering culture.

There are a few last-minute tickets still available if you'd like to join us - come and say hello!

CTO Craft Con: Europe 2026
Join CTO Craft Con Europe 2026 in Amsterdam - an intimate, community-centered gathering for engineering leaders to connect, learn through insightful sessions, and build real peer relationships in a supportive environment.
CTO Craft Con: Europe 2026

That's it, let's look at some links! See you next week

Andy @ CTO Craft

CTO Craft Con - Dates for Your Diary

SPONSORED
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CISO vs. CTO Pressure: Turning Identity into an Engine for Velocity and Trust

As a CTO, you are constantly balancing the need for business velocity with the reality of security pressure. Join Rachel Case, Senior Director, Solutions Engineering at Okta/Auth0 and Markus Winkler, Co-founder, CTO and Managing Director of Oparco, on Thursday 8th October at 12PM for a practical, peer-to-peer fireside chat on how engineering leaders can successfully navigate the CISO relationship, align on shared risk, and use smart identity architecture to satisfy security without sacrificing speed.

What they’ll discuss:

  • The CISO vs. CTO Divide
  • Where Identity Sits in the Middle
  • What “Good” Looks Like
Register for the free event 👉

CTO Craft Mixers Coming Up

See the whole calendar here - not in your city yet? Drop us a line!

Reads of the Week

What helps an identity crisis?
This piece is something special and different on Fight for the Human. And honestly, as a fan of collaborative thinking, distributed cognition, and the notion that innovation is most likely sparked in the interactions between people, I can’t believe I haven’t done this before: a back-and-forth
Fight for the Human by Cat HicksCat Hicks
Nobody Prepares You To Make Decisions Other People Execute
From writing code to translating strategy into work an engineering team can execute.
Thriving In EngineeringAlex Ponomarev and Gautam Govind

Leadership, Strategy & Business

The Most Important Laws you Need to Know For Leading Engineering Teams
How Conway, Brooks, Goodhart, Hofstadter, and other laws help you lead high-performing engineering teams.
Engineering LeadershipGregor Ojstersek and Dr Milan Milanović
Managers Are Catalysts
As an industry, we like to shout a lot about experiments when we kick them off, all confident swagger that this time our superior intellects have landed from first principles on the correct reimagining of this or that piece of conventional wisdom. For a long time I had the idea of maintaining a receipts index for tech blogs, “Company X has declared Y is dead, do Z”, two years later, “Z is dead do Alpha!”. So many many examples in our industry it’s hard to choose just one example, but you could do worse than the Spotify management model, which…
Kellan Elliott-McCrea: BlogKellan Elliott-McCrea
6 Principles for Sustainable Technology Leadership
A principle is only useful when it reveals something you had not noticed before. The philosophy article is the origin story of these six principles and why I believe they matter.
LinkedInLead Different HQ
The 4 engineering management archetypes
What would the sorting hat say about you?
Manager.devAnton Zaides

Culture, People & Teams

Building a truth-seeking organisation
To lead well is to seek truth.
The Engineering ManagerJames Stanier
I don’t want the details
Why reasonable explanations are one of the easiest ways to avoid changing anything.
michaelheap.com
What it’s like to work at an AI-native company
Field notes from a millennial raised in pre-AI tech
Elena's Growth ScoopElena Verna
RDEL #162: What makes a great co-worker in an AI-native workplace?
Across 1,534 knowledge workers, technical skill ranked 2nd of 75 qualities for an AI co-worker and 20th for a human one, while accountability stayed firmly with humans.
Research-Driven Engineering LeadershipResearch-Driven Engineering Leadership

Technology, Operations & Delivery

What would you do if you had a computer of your own?
LLM’s response
Alex Ewerlöf NotesAlex Ewerlöf
How to write an outcome-based OKR when your user is an AI agent
Agents have behavior but they have no interest nor consequence. If you’re going to write OKRs for your AI agents, make sure the KR measures human behavior.
Jeff GothelfJeff Gothelf
Data modernization: A practical guide for getting it right | Thoughtworks
Data modernization: A practical guide for getting it right
ThoughtworksGaurav Kantrod
Jev (Product Review)
This week I learned about Jev, an AI decision model from TypeSafe AI that’s quite different from the LLMs we’ve grown used to. Image Credit: screenshot Jev isn’t your standard tex…
As I learn ...

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

How to Unclench
A field guide to the strange, trainable skill of unclenching.
Jonny MillerJonny Miller
Workplace connection has a strong ROI
ALSO: Daniel Susskind cuts through the noise of AI & jobs
Make Work BetterBruce Daisley
If You’re Always Available, When Do You Work?
Why protecting just three hours could transform your productivity and prevent daily overwhelm.
Carl Pullein's Timeless Time ManagementCarl Pullein
The grief, loneliness, and burnout sweeping through the tech industry right now | Molly Graham
Listen now (94 mins) | Molly Graham revisits her famous career advice for the AI era, and explains why delegating to a robot is nothing like delegating to a human
Lenny's NewsletterLenny Rachitsky

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!

Campus by CTO Craft: The Go-to Resource for Senior Technology Leaders
Created for CTOs, by CTOs: A transformative learning community for senior technology leaders in startups and scale-ups
CTO Craft Campus

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Have an amazing week!

Andy

Published by:

Andy Skipper