Tech Lead Journal

“There’s a substantial difference between building software and then building software for production and then building software for scale."

Mohammed Alabsi is a seasoned technology leader, an angel investor, and a venture fellow at Insignia Ventures. Mohammed worked at Amazon for 10 years, before moving to Southeast Asia and helped scale up Bukalapak towards its IPO. In this episode, Mohammed started by sharing his lessons learned from his time at Amazon, working on EC2, advertising business, and B2B e-commerce. Mohammed then shared his journey at Bukalapak and described the challenges that he had to tackle during the scale-up stage, such as setting up engineering processes and governance, growing high-performing engineering teams rapidly, and building alignment across those multiple teams. He also gave great tips for leaders on the importance of managing up and keeping the leadership and stakeholders in the loop. Towards the end, Mohammed shared about his current role as a tech investor and advisor and gave some great advice on common mistakes startup should avoid, as well as advice for tech leaders in the early stage startups.

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Mohammed Alabsi’s Bio

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“Architecture is context. You can only make the right trade-offs between alternatives if you know the context drivers."

Eltjo Poort is the architecture practice lead at CGI Netherlands with over 30 years of experience in the software industry. In this episode, Eltjo started by explaining the importance of architecture context and business drivers that can help an architect understand the different trade-offs and options in order to make the right architecture decisions. Eltjo shared the architect’s main responsibilities and how architects should avoid writing big and long architecture documents by understanding the different goals of an architecture document. Eltjo also shared his great insights on how we should deal with technical debt, “move slow and fix things”, and put a more balanced effort towards working on enablers in order to maintain sustainable pace in delivering great software. Towards the end, Eltjo shared a few anti-patterns that architects should avoid based on his article “Waterfall Wasteland and Agile Outback”.

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Eltjo Poort’s Bio

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“Focus on what really matters. If everything matters, then nothing matters. Make sure that what you do is aligned with what really matters."

Peter Stevens and Maria Matarelli are the co-founders of the Personal Agility Institute and the authors of the “Personal Agility”. In this episode, Peter and Maria shared what Personal Agility System is and how we can apply this framework in our daily lives. They highlighted how many people face typical challenges that hinder them from truly getting what they want by using the “life is an ocean” metaphor. Both of them then gave a complete walkthrough of the 6 powerful questions in Personal Agility System, especially highlighting the key question to find “what really matters”. Peter and Maria then shared how this framework is not just applicable to individual, but also to leadership and organizational agility, and how it can help create alignment and trust within an organization.

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Peter and Maria’s Bio

Maria Matarelli is an Executive Coach, Consultant to the Fortune 100, Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and an international best selling author. Maria and her team consult businesses to reach breakthrough results by applying Agile methodologies. Maria is the founder and CEO of Formula Ink and co-founder of the Agile Marketing Academy.

Together, Peter and Maria founded the Personal Agility Institute with the mission of helping people and organizations align what they do with what really matters to become who they want to be and achieve what they want to achieve.

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“It is good to improve your processes to make them faster and more efficient. But sometimes what’s even more important is doing the right thing in the first place."

Scott Wlaschin is the author of “Domain Modeling Made Functional” and the popular F# site fsharpforfunandprofit.com. In this episode, Scott began by sharing his view of the need for developers today to become more polyglot developers and learn multiple programming languages. Scott then shared about functional programming (FP) fundamentals and how FP differs with object-oriented programming, as well as cases when one is better suited than the other. Scott then explained how we can use FP when implementing Domain-Driven Design (DDD), including how to model some of the DDD tactical designs and transaction boundary. He also shared why F# is his favorite and go-to programming language. Towards the end, Scott touched on important advice about effectiveness vs efficiency, and what leaders need to be aware of regarding doing the right thing.

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Scott Wlaschin’s Bio

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“Oftentimes it’s not about what’s being said. It’s the fact that there’s not a shared understanding of what’s being said. It’s important that organizations proactively think about how they build a common language and manage that."

Jonathon Hensley is the co-founder and CEO of EMERGE, a digital product consulting firm, and the author of “Alignment: Overcoming internal sabotage and digital product failure”. In this episode, Jonathon shared the main motivation for him writing “Alignment”, which is to understand why digital products and services fail so commonly. He shared the concept of alignment, how it aligns with our biological need, and why it is so important for leaders to get right in order to deliver successful great products and services. Jonathon then explained the danger of when organization is at war with itself and what are the common reasons that cause internal misalignments. Jonathon shared how leaders can work towards creating alignment, and why it is important to move away from monolithic product thinking and move more towards platform thinking. Finally, Jonathon also shared some team alignment recipes that can transform one team to become a high-performing product team.

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Jonathon Hensley’s Bio

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“We want to create organizations that can surprise us and do things beyond what we’ve designed them to do, rather than a machine, which only operates in the box that you’ve designed."

Jardena London is a business transformation consultant and the author of “Cultivating Transformations”. In this episode, Jardena shared insights from her book on transformational leadership and how one can become a better leader. Jardena shared the 3 different transformational leadership lenses: the “Me”, “We”, and “System” lenses and we covered several important concepts, such as self-mastery, authenticity, psychological safety, resonance and dissonance, and systems thinking. Towards the end, Jardena shared how organizations should avoid becoming machines and instead create thriving human living systems, and thus become soulful organizations.

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Jardena London’s Bio

Jardena’s mission is to help organizations create soulful, productive and fun workplace environments that support organizational and cultural change together with improving financial results. Jardena has also served as co-founder and CEO of Rosetta Technology Group since 1997.

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“Interactions with domain experts play a key role in implementing software. You have to make sure that you understand the problem you’re solving. You cannot provide a software solution without understanding the problem first."

Vladik Khononov is the author of “Learning Domain-Driven Design”. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Vlad started by sharing why understanding business domain is crucial in software engineering and how DDD can help build the shared understanding between domain experts and software engineers. Vlad then explained the two important designs in DDD, i.e. the strategic and tactical designs, and how they relate to each other. For each design, Vlad touched on some important patterns, such as bounded context, context map, subdomain, aggregate, entity, and value object. Towards the end, Vlad gave great tips on applying DDD to brownfield projects and how those projects can benefit the most from some of the DDD practices.

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Vladik Khononov’s Bio

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“It’s great if developers have understanding about the domain, because then they can propose better solutions, that’s not necessarily the same solution that the users have in mind, which are often limited by what they know."

Stefan Hofer is the co-author of Domain Storytelling–a collaborative, visual and agile way to build domain-driven software. In this episode, Stefan shared the story of how he came up with Domain Storytelling and explained how this technique can help us understand business domain better and bridge the misunderstandings between software developers and domain experts. Stefan walked us through how the modeling works, including the notations and other pictorial aspects of it, and emphasized the importance of the collaborative aspect of Domain Storytelling. Stefan then explained how Domain Storytelling differs from other similar modeling techniques, such as Event Storming, and gave practical tips on how to run a successful online collaborative workshop.

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Stefan Hofer’s Bio

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“Documentation is content marketing. If your docs don’t summarize what your product is actually about, you’re going to have a rough time getting anybody interested."

Meredydd Luff is the founder of Anvil, the platform for building web apps with nothing but Python. In this episode, Meredydd shared his story starting Anvil and his point of view on the latest Low-Code & No-Code movement and whether it would affect the demand for developers. He touched on the importance of domain experts having the ability to develop software and how tools like Anvil could play a part in supporting them to translate their ideas better. In the second half of the episode, we discussed the importance of product documentation and how it also plays a major part in content marketing. Meredydd shared his tips and best practices for documentation, including how to create thriving online Q&A product forums.

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Meredydd Luff’s Bio

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“Because we ship stuff now almost immediately into public facing clients, almost as soon as we’re writing a line of code, we need to be thinking about how we make sure that it’s a secure line of code and it will be deployed and operated securely as well."

Eoin Woods is the co-author of “Continuous Architecture in Practice” and the CTO at Endava. In this last of a three-part series of “Continuous Architecture” episodes, Eoin shared the remaining two important quality attributes covered in the book, i.e. security and resilience. Eoin explained why we should treat security as a critical quality attribute, the changes in the security landscape that make security becomes more challenging, the threat modeling concept, how to do continuous threat modeling, and his 10 secure by design principles. Eoin then shared about resilience as a quality attribute, how we should differentiate resilience from high availability, some common resilience techniques that we can implement in our system, and the importance of embracing failure mindset.

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Eoin Woods’s Bio

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