SWLW #480: Architecture without Architects, Life investment thesis, 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

​​Architecture Without Architects (Video)
52 minutes read.

This talk by Erik Dörnenburg should be part of the onboarding material for engineers joining your team. Software Architect is a role, not a title. It’s a skill, a mindset, and expertise to acquire. It has to be part of the team and not forced upon one.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

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Culture

What Makes a Startup Successful? Let's Have Some Fun! Wrong Answers Only
1 minute read.

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

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


5 Questions Every Manager Needs to Ask Their Direct Reports
5 minutes read.

Leverage Susan Peppercorn's wonderful questions to help your teammates build their career path, and understand their motivation. Use that in your 1:1s and your Feedback (/Performance) Reviews. It will often take some time and building trust before you can use these questions, but have them on your notes.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Optimizing Workspace for Productivity, Focus, & Creativity
4 minutes read.

I'm a big fan of The Huberman Lab Podcast, and Juan Pablo Aranovich captures many insights that can be practical when designing your office space. What would you adopt to change your work environment at home? What about your office? Do you want to mark spaces for creative work? Maybe recommend them to move rooms when working on a different type of work?

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Testing Distributed Systems: Curated List of Resources on Testing Distributed Systems
8 minutes read.

The way we approach (what is possible) and write tests deeply change our culture and our way of running production systems. It's hard to think of building robust systems without having good understanding of distributed systems challenges. When we don’t have these, we always look for a way to “compensate” — manual tests, avoiding writing tests at all, or doing more manual operations work. Share this internally to surface more options and get people to learn ways to test and operate distributed systems.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

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Peopleware

Managing Yourself
3 minutes read.

"On probing a bit more, I ended up telling them that they don’t have a time-management problem, and their problem is self-management. Time is not a manageable entity — every moment, we inherit a new moment, and the current moment becomes the past. Each moment comes and goes. But, what we do with those moments is manageable." -- Subbu Allamaraju recommends that we look out how we run our day as the "CEO of yourself." A powerful framing to take control over our day, rather than letting others (emails, slack, etc.) run the show.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Learning a Technical Subject
6 minutes read.

I think many of us can relate to Murat Demirbas's way of learning: "I need to wrestle with the subject myself. I need to grapple with it and roll on the floor. This comes in the form of asking questions, making guesses, trying things, and seeing them broken, and amending my understanding to make new hypotheses." I love his "Exploring a city analogy" framing and the type of roles (expertise) you can practice. You don't need to become an "architect" at every topic, but when you want to, consider this framing to understand your current level.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Life Investment Thesis
4 minutes read.

An inspirational idea by Mitchell Cohen to explore and experiment in your life - What would you write? Worth sharing with your partner to see which areas you'd like to work on together.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

And finally, inspiring tweets...

@ValaAfshar: The ability to stay calm and polite, even when people upset you, is a superpower.

@Julian: Before you start an important conversation, try to ask: do i care more about being right or getting to the truth? the latter requires shrinking your ego. the trick is to remember that people who truly care about you don't judge you for being wrong—only for refusing to admit it.



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.