Tech Lead Journal

“If we want to deliver better results, we need to change the system and our way of working."

Gil Broza is an Agile leadership expert and the author of the latest book “Deliver Better Results”. In this episode, Gil discusses ways to level up our value delivery system to deliver better results.

We first delve into the fundamental concept of systems thinking and cause-effect relationships, which are exemplified by reinforcing and balancing loops. Gil also explains the importance of ways of working, particularly on shifting mindset and focusing on people first before the process.

Gil then explains the SQUARE Model detailed in his book, and how the model helps us understand and assess our system’s fitness for purpose easily. He also shares some of the 10 strategies from his book that we can use to enhance our fitness level and deliver better results.
 

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Gil Broza’s Bio
Gil Broza specializes in helping tech leaders deliver far better results by upgrading their Agile ways of working. He also supports their non-software colleagues in creating real business agility in their teams. Gil has helped over 100 organizations achieve real, sustainable improvements by working with their unique value delivery contexts and focusing on mindset, culture, and leadership. Companies also invite Gil for specialized support, such as strategic mapping of their improvement journey, facilitation of organizational mindset workshops, and keynotes for internal conferences. He is the author of four highly acclaimed books: Deliver Better Results, The Agile Mind-Set, The Human Side of Agile, and Agile for Non-Software Teams. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/160.

“A lot of developers tie their self-worth to their code. Being able to let go of your ego and understanding the feedback is based on the code, and it has nothing to do with anything about me. It’s just the code.”

Adrienne Tacke is a software engineer, keynote speaker, and the author of the upcoming book “Looks Good To Me”.

In this episode, we discuss code reviews and why it is an essential part of the software development process. Adrienne discusses the importance and benefits of code review, the common code review workflow and the different roles involved, how to provide effective code review comments, and why we should leverage on code review tools and automation. She also provides tips on how to speed up our code review turnaround time.  

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Adrienne Tacke’s Bio
Adrienne is a Filipina software engineer, keynote speaker, author of the best-selling book Coding for Kids: Python, and a LinkedIn Learning instructor who’s reached over 65,000 learners with her courses (a number she’ll likely surpass when you read this). She is writing Looks Good To Me: Constructive Code Reviews, a labor of love that she hopes will improve code reviews everywhere. Perhaps most important, however, is that she spends way too much money on desserts and ungodly amounts of time playing Age of Empires II.

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/159.

“Every organization has a mission, a vision, and a set of values. As a leader, your number one task is to live those values and talk about them at every opportunity with your team to create alignment."

Today's clip is from Tech Lead Journal episode 115 with Manoj Awasthi, the CTO at JULO and previously the SVP of Engineering at Tokopedia.

In this clip, Manoj described the role of a senior engineering leader before then explaining some important aspects of engineering leadership, such as scaling up engineering team, hiring engineers and engineering managers, and creating culture alignment.  

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Manoj Awasthi’s Bio
Manoj Awasthi is the CTO at JULO, a fintech startup based in Jakarta. Prior to JULO, Manoj spent more than six years leading technology teams at Tokopedia wearing multiple hats during the growth years of Tokopedia from 2016 until 2022 as it scaled. During this time, he witnessed the tech team growing from 80 people to 2000+. He is a techie at heart, has a natural empathy for people and believes that wonders can happen through the alignment of teams towards a clear goal. When he is not working, he can be found either reading a book (almost every day) or having quality time with his family.

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/115.

“An effective developer is an effective software tester. As a developer, it’s your responsibility to make sure what you do works. And automated testing is such an easy and cheap way of doing it."

Today's clip is from Tech Lead Journal episode 139 with Mauricio Aniche, the author of “Effective Software Testing”.

In this clip, Mauricio explained how to become a more effective software developer by using effective and systematic software testing approaches. We discussed several such testing techniques, such as testing pyramid, specification-based testing, and behavior-driven design.

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Mauricio Aniche’s Bio
Dr. Maurício Aniche’s life mission is to help software engineers to become better and more productive. Maurício is a Tech Lead at Adyen, where he heads the Tech Academy team and leads different engineering enablement initiatives. Maurício is also an assistant professor of software engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. His teaching efforts in software testing gave him the Computer Science Teacher of the Year 2021 award and the TU Delft Education Fellowship, a prestigious fellowship given to innovative lecturers. He is the author of the “Effective Software Testing: A Developer’s Guide”, published by Manning in 2022. He’s currently working on a new book entitled “Simple Object-Oriented Design” which should be on the market soon.

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/139.

“The three core dimensions of developer experience are feedback loops, cognitive load, and flow state."

Today's clip is from Tech Lead Journal episode 134 with Margaret-Anne (Peggy) Storey and Abi Noda, the coauthors of the ACM paper “DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity”.

In this clip, they shared their view on the well-known SPACE and DORA metrics, and pointed out the danger of misusing and abusing the DORA metrics. Peggy and Abi then explained the three core dimensions of developer experience from their latest paper, which are feedback loops, cognitive load, and flow state.

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Margaret-Anne Storey’s Bio
Margaret-Anne (Peggy) Storey is a professor of computer science at the University of Victoria and holds a Canada Research Chair in human and social aspects of software engineering. Her research focuses on improving processes, tools, communication, and collaboration in software engineering. She serves as chief scientist at DX and consults with Microsoft to improve developer productivity.

Abi Noda’s Bio
Abi Noda is the founder and CEO at DX, where he leads the company’s strategic direction and R&D efforts. His work focuses on developing measurement methods to help organizations improve developer experience and productivity. Before joining DX, Noda held engineering leadership roles at various companies and founded Pull Panda, which was acquired by GitHub in 2019. For more information, visit his website at abinoda.com.

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/134.

“Developer experience is an approach to thinking about engineering excellence and maximizing engineering performance by increasing the capacity and performance of the individuals and the team as a whole."

Today's clip is from Tech Lead Journal episode 112 with Abi Noda, the CEO & co-founder of DX.

In this clip, Abi shared what developer experience is, why it is becoming an industry trend nowadays, and the different ways of how it is being implemented in the industry. Abi explained why the traditional metrics normally used to measure developer productivity do not really work and can even provide perverse incentives. Abi then touched on the two popular researches widely known in the industry, i.e. the DORA report and SPACE framework.  

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Abi Noda’s Bio
Abi is the founder and CEO of getdx.com, which helps engineering leaders measure and improve developer experience. Abi formerly founded Pull Panda, which was acquired by GitHub.

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/112.

“A good API doesn’t expose the internal data models or internal logic too much. And the more your clients are not under your control, the less you want to do that."

Today's clip is from Tech Lead Journal episode 125 with Daniel Luebke, a software architect and the co-author of “Patterns for API Design”.

In this clip, we discussed some API design patterns and best practices taken from his book. Daniel shared the importance of understanding domain requirements for building APIs and several API and message best practices. 

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Daniel Luebke’s Bio
Daniel Lübke is an independent coding and consulting software architect with a focus on business process automation and digitization projects. His interests are software architecture, business process design, and system integration, which inherently require APIs to develop solutions. He received his PhD at the Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany, in 2007 and has worked in many industry projects in different domains since then. Daniel is author and editor of several books, articles, and research papers; gives training; and regularly presents at conferences on topics of APIs and software architecture.

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/125.

“A team has to be able to go fast if they have to. But they should always choose to go at a steady pace, most of the time. In the long run, what we emphasize is for each team to find their own space and pace."

Balazs Barna is the Head of US Engineering at Wise. In this episode, we delved into his insights on building sustainable engineering from scaling up Wise. Balazs started by touching on the engineering management role and described the traits of good and bad engineering management. We then went to discuss two different aspects of sustainable engineering, which are sustainable tech and sustainable teams. Throughout the discussion, Balazs outlined several key practices, such as weak code ownership, microservice strategy, stable pace, and building a bench.  

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Balazs Barna’s Bio
Balazs Barna is the Head of Austin Operations & US Engineering at Wise. At Wise, Balazs oversees the newly formed Austin office and the global engineering team, building the tech and infrastructure needed to facilitate instant, convenient and affordable cross border transactions. Balazs led and helped his team build the company’s historic direct access integration to the Hungarian banking sector’s instant payment system, the first of its kind for a company with a payment service license. He also oversaw and built Wise’s core infrastructure that enables the company’s European operations. Prior to joining Wise, Balazs worked at MSCI and Morgan Stanley. He graduated from Corvinus University of Budapest in Business Information Systems (BSc), and Computer Engineering (MSc) from Pannon University.

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/158.

“In a world that runs on software, when we develop and deploy software, we are part of a larger system where our failures are no longer about us, they are also about other people."

Today's clip is from Tech Lead Journal episode 122 with Kevlin Henney, a consultant, writer, and speaker on software development and has written and edited several popular books.

In this clip, Kevlin brought up some timeless software development concepts developers should learn from the past on cohesion, coupling, and code quality. He also explained why he becomes associated with public software failures widely known as KevlinHenney screens and how the trend started in the beginning.

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Kevlin Henney’s Bio
Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant, trainer, writer and speaker. His interests cover what happens on both sides of the keyboard, and everything from the detail of code to the bigger picture of software architecture. Kevlin is co–author of two volumes in the Pattern–Oriented Software Architecture series, editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know and co-editor of 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know.

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/122.

“Everything in software architecture is a trade-off, and the why is more important than how."

Today's clip is from Tech Lead Journal episode 120 with Neal Ford, a Director and software architect at ThoughtWorks.

In this clip, we discussed the definition of software architecture and how it relates to software design. Neal then described the two important laws of software architecture related to trade-offs and the why. Neal then explained why software architecture is difficult and discussed the hard parts.  

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Neal Ford’s Bio
Neal Ford is Director, Software Architect, and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks. He is also the designer and developer of applications, articles, video presentations, and author and/or editor of an increasingly large number of books spanning a variety of subjects and technologies, including the two most recent Fundamentals of Software Architecture and Building Evolutionary Architectures. His professional focus includes designing and building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at over 700 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 3000 presentations.

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/120.