SWLW #479: Scaling the practice of Architecture, Technical Feasibility, and more!

Heya and happy Friday,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week. If you want to support my work or join SWLW community - scroll down to the bottom of the email to see how.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Scaling the Practice of Architecture, Conversationally
14 minutes read.

Andrew Harmel-Law will get you thinking about how to decentralize decision-making to the teams' level: "The Rule: anyone can make an architectural decision. The Qualifier: the decision-taker must consult everyone who will be meaningfully affected by the decision and people with expertise in the area the decision is being taken." -- Andrew takes us through a set of practices and frameworks to consider. Many practices can be adopted as a step in the right direction (e.g. ADRs and The Architecture Advisory Forum). Share internally and discuss which you want to explore with the team today.

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Culture

Guided DevOps Meditation
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

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How “Engineering-Driven” Leads to “Engineering-Supremacy”
6 minutes read.

"If I was interviewing an engineer and they made any alienating sort of comment whatsoever about their counterparts on the business side, it was an automatic no. Easy out. We had a zero tolerance policy for talking down down about other functions, or joking, even for being unwilling to perform other business functions. In retrospect, I think this is one of the best decisions we ever made." -- Charity Majors with a post every potential leader needs to read. It will change so many things in how you interview, conduct demos, celebrate newly signed deals, and learn from each other.

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What Are According to You the Most Common Signs That an Organization Takes Security Seriously? (Thread)
3 minutes read.

John Opdenakker started an interesting discussion on org's security approach - How would you answer this question? What do other technical leaders and managers think is the right approach for your company? What is worth optimizing for? What is nice to have? What is critical to get right? What would you enforce?

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The Biggest Mistake I See Engineers Make
6 minutes read.

Wonderful advice we should all remember and apply: "When you work on a team, you shouldn’t be in competition with other schoolmates or interns or teammates – you are working cooperatively to ship the best possible product, as quickly as possible. And there’s a huge advantage in leveraging the team’s collective wisdom to build better and faster. Early career engineers don’t always know this – they need to be taught it. Senior engineers can be overconfident and need to be reminded of it. And as a manager, you need to be on the lookout for this flawed approach in order to keep your team productive."

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Peopleware

Technical Feasibility: What Do I Do as a Tech Lead?
7 minutes read.

I enjoyed Tim Reynolds's framing for how he leads as a Tech Lead for the team (focus on Time, Skills & Technology): "At the beginning of the project, I will direct my activities towards drafting a feasibility analysis report. This gives me a document where I can record answers to questions like the ones in the previous sections, and share the outcome of my research with the team and any stakeholders."

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In the Early Days of Segment, Right After We Crossed $10m ARR Our Growth Decelerated 8x From 300% Yoy to 40% Yoy in 6 Months. What the Hell Happened? How Did We Reaccelerate Back to 100% YoY? (Thread)
3 minutes read.

Peter Reinhardt (ex-CEO of Segment) shares his insights as a leader trying to save his company by changing his (default) leadership style: "I obviously wasn’t writing code any more, but problem solving is what I was good at. And now I was supposed to just… state the problems so others can solve them?"

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Prioritization, Multiple Work Streams, Unplanned Work. Oh My!
10 minutes read.

Leeor Engel's "Work stream best practices" can serve as a powerful career growth methodology when assigning engineers to work streams. Managers with enough context into the work stream, can leverage ongoing context to let engineers experiment with bigger efforts over time in the work stream.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@BrokerChange: In startups you have to be obsessed with speed. You have to move fast because that's your one natural advantage over the big companies. But there's one thing you should never rush - hiring.

@mikekarnj: Documentation > Meetings



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.