Tech Lead Journal

“Coding well with others or being a team player is at the heart of everything we do as developers. Unless you’re coding yourself for a piece of software that only you are going to use, you’re not a solo developer."

Fernando Doglio is the author of “Skills of a Software Developer”. In this episode, Fernando shared some insights from his book on how to be a successful software developer. He highlighted that software development is a mostly a team effort and shared tips on how we can work well within a team, including not to fall into the trap of over-engineering and early optimization. He then shared some practical tips on technical interviews and what we should avoid writing in our resume. Towards the end, Fernando gave his tips to aspiring authors who want to write a technical book and cleared some misconceptions and mental blocks that may stop a lot of them from writing.

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Fernando Doglio’s Bio

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“Understanding what makes code readable from a cognitive perspective will help you design better. There are so many areas of programming where knowing something about knowing is just going to make you happier and more effective."

Felienne Hermans is the author of “The Programmer’s Brain” and an Associate Professor at Leiden University. She is also the creator of the Hedy programming language, the co-founder of Joy of Coding conference, and a host at Software Engineering Radio podcast. In this episode, Felienne explained why programming is one of the most demanding cognitive activities and described the three different cognitive processes involved. We discussed why code reading is hard and how to get better at it, the connection between programming and spoken languages, naming things and why it is so important to get it right, and how to avoid having bugs in our thinking.

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Felienne Hermans’s Bio

Felienne is the creator of the Hedy programming language, and was one of the founders of the Joy of Coding conference. Since 2016, she has been a host at Software Engineering Radio, one of the most popular software engineering podcasts on the web. Felienne is also the author of “The Programmer’s Brain” a book that helps programmers understand how their brains work and how to use it more effectively.

In 2021, Felienne was awarded the Dutch Prize for ICT research. Felienne is a member the board of I&I, the Dutch association of high-school computer science teachers, and of TC39, the committee that designs JavaScript.

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“Software engineering involves a lot of decisions, and that decision has some trade-offs. We have pros and cons. It’s not like one decision is always better than the other."

Tomasz Lelek is the author of “Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs”. In this episode, Tomasz shared what led him to write his book and one of the past software mistakes from his career experience. He also gave advice on how software developers should approach the potential software mistakes and explained some typical trade-offs when making software engineering design decisions, such as code duplication vs flexibility, premature optimization vs optimizing hot-path, data locality and memory, and finally delivery semantics in distributed systems.

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Tomasz Lelek’s Bio

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“DevOps is about creating a collaborative environment between the development team and the operations team, and aligning goals and incentives between those two teams. Because so many of the problems that we encounter in life, not just even in technology, are due to misalignment of goals."

Jeffery Smith is the author of “Operations Anti-Patterns, DevOps Solutions” and the Director of Production Operations at Centro. In this episode, Jeffery described DevOps essentials and emphasized what DevOps is not. He also explained about CAMS, a framework that outlines the core components required for successful DevOps transformation. We then discussed three anti-patterns taken from his book: paternalist syndrome, alert fatigue, and wasting perfectly good incident; and he explained how to recognize those anti-patterns in order to avoid them on our DevOps journey. Finally, Jeffery also talked about postmortem and shared tips on how to cultivate a good postmortem culture.

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Jeffery Smith’s Bio

Jeff is passionate about DevOps transformations in organizations large and small, with a particular interest in the psychological aspects of problems in companies. He lives in Chicago with his wife Stephanie and their two kids Ella and Xander.

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“The main goal of unit testing is to enable sustainable growth of your software project that enables you to move faster with a more quality code base."

Vladimir Khorikov is the author of “Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns” and the founder of Enterprise Craftsmanship blog. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about unit testing. Vladimir broke down the four pillars of unit testing and the anatomy of a good unit test, as well as mentioned a couple of common unit testing anti-patterns. We also discussed topics such as test-driven development, code coverage and other unit testing metrics, test mocks and how to use it properly, and how to be pragmatic when writing unit tests.

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Vladimir Khorikov’s Bio

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“Software telemetry is what you use to figure out what your production systems are doing. It’s all about shortening that feedback loop between the user experience and the engineers who are writing the user experience."

Jamie Riedesel is a Staff Engineer at Dropbox working on the HelloSign product and also the author of “Software Telemetry”. In this episode, Jamie shared an overview of software telemetry and explained why it is important for us to understand how our production systems are behaving by using those telemetry data. She also explained different software telemetry types, concepts such as observability and cardinality, and shared some software telemetry best practices.

In the second part of our conversation, Jamie opened up and shared her own personal experience dealing with toxic work environments. She emphasized the importance of self-awareness and psychological safety, as well as went through the five key dynamics to a successful team based on Google’s re:Work blog post.

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Jamie Riedesel’s Bio

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“Good code should be resilient to bugs. It should make it easier to do the changes that you want to the system. Some refactoring could make it harder to make changes. So, if you guess wrongly the direction of the software, then it can have a negative effect."

Christian Clausen is a Technical Agile Coach specializing in teaching teams on how to refactor their code properly. He is also the author of “Five Lines of Code”. In this episode, Christian explained in-depth about refactoring, when and how we should do refactoring, the components, workflow, and pillars of refactoring. Christian also shared about a few important architectural refactoring, such as composition over inheritance and changing by addition instead of modification. Finally, Christian also shared a few tips for writing quality software, such as the five lines of code rule, the habit of deleting code, and avoiding optimization and generality.

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Christian Clausen’s Bio

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“Decide where it is you’re going and what kind of career you need to live the life you want and aim for that really deliberately. Because if you don’t know where you’re going, then you never will get there."

Don Jones is the author of “Own Your Tech Career” and the VP of Developer Skills at Pluralsight. In this episode, Don explained why it is important for us to understand the career we want and aim to build that career deliberately, instead of keep chasing promotion and more money continuously, and thus winding up in a rat race. He emphasized a few important things as part of owning our career, such as the importance of soft skills, showing yourself as a professional, building a personal brand, and being a better decision-maker. Do not miss a couple of showing up as professional tips that Don adopted from Disney!

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Don Jones’s Bio

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This episode is proudly sponsored by Emergence, the journal of business agility. This quarterly publication brings you inspiring stories from the most innovative companies and explores themes of new ways of working, reclaiming management, and humanizing business. Each issue is hand illustrated and 100% content. Use the promo code “techlead” to get a 10% discount on your annual subscription. Visit businessagility.institute/emergence to get your edition and support the publication supporting your podcast.

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“Going from development to management is not a promotion. It’s an entirely new career. And there is normally a lack of proper guidance for that."

Alvaro Moya is the founder of Lidr, a community that prepares and transforms the tech leaders and CTOs of tomorrow through immersive, experiential, and community-driven programs. In this episode, Alvaro shared the story of Lidr and why he started it, learning from his own journey working in multiple startups and scaleups. Alvaro then shared his view on technical leadership, the challenges surrounding it, and why it is important for companies to prioritize on improving leadership. Alvaro also touched on how tech leaders can create and nurture high-performing teams, with an emphasis on cultivating ownership, as well as giving some advice on how we should plan and choose our career track and progression, including tips and practices on how we can become better tech leaders through practising leadership informally.

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Alvaro Moya’s Bio

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This episode is proudly sponsored by Emergence, the journal of business agility. This quarterly publication brings you inspiring stories from the most innovative companies and explores themes of new ways of working, reclaiming management, and humanizing business. Each issue is hand illustrated and 100% content. Use the promo code “techlead” to get a 10% discount on your annual subscription. Visit businessagility.institute/emergence to get your edition and support the publication supporting your podcast.

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“The whole point of microservices and adopting microservices is not to have microservices. The goal is to improve the software delivery key metrics, i.e. rapid, reliable, frequent, and sustainable delivery of software."

Chris Richardson is a recognized thought leader in microservices and the author of “Microservices Patterns”. In this episode, we opened our conversation talking about the current state of microservices vs monolith architecture. Chris then explained why he thinks monolith is not actually an anti-pattern and when it’s a good time for us to consider adopting microservice architecture. He then shared about the success triangle for implementing microservices, important concepts such as design time coupling and some microservices patterns, such as the Saga pattern, and how his current work on Eventuate can help developers to implement these patterns easier. At the end, Chris briefly explained some of his important principles for decomposing a monolith successfully.

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Chris Richardson’s Bio

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This episode is proudly sponsored by Emergence, the journal of business agility. This quarterly publication brings you inspiring stories from the most innovative companies and explores themes of new ways of working, reclaiming management, and humanizing business. Each issue is hand illustrated and 100% content. Use the promo code “techlead” to get a 10% discount on your annual subscription. Visit businessagility.institute/emergence to get your edition and support the publication supporting your podcast.

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