Tech Lead Journal

“Seriously good software is not just software that works. It is not just software that satisfies its functional requirements, so it does the right thing, but it also does it in the right way."

Marco Faella is an associate professor at the University of Naples Federico II and the author of “Seriously Good Software”. In this episode, Marco explained what he means by seriously good software, looking at software quality from multiple different perspectives. We then dived deep into several of those software qualities with some practical tips on how software engineers can improve their craft to produce high-quality software. Towards the end, we also touched on the concept of minimum viable code, why it is important to have an idea of what the ideal code looks like, while still being practical in finding the right compromise.

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Marco Faella’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 most important thing is to make it easy for people to contribute. And the second thing is to have as many people as possible. For that, you build a community, and decide what people you want in your community."

Julien Dubois is the creator of JHipster and manages the Java Developer Advocacy team at Microsoft. In this episode, Julien shared about the state of Java for cloud native applications, as well as Java adoption within Microsoft and Azure. Julien also shared his story on founding JHipster, his developer advocacy work at Microsoft, as well as some tips on how to run a successful open source project.

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Julien Dubois’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 cloud is a change in operating model. It isn’t IT procurement. If you don’t change the way your organization works, the cloud is going to look much more like another data center.“

Gregor Hohpe is the author of “Software Architect Elevator” and “Cloud Strategy”. In this episode, Gregor started our conversation by explaining the role of a software architect, the reason for the latest resurgence of the role, and his software architect elevator concept. He then described what a good architecture should look like and how to deal with trade-offs by using the analogy of financial options. We then discussed in-depth about the cloud and why adopting cloud requires a lifestyle change in order to benefit from it the most. Gregor also described why organizations need a good viable cloud strategy and debunked the concern of many organizations on cloud vendor lock-in. He also gave his tips on how organizations should approach building an in-house cloud platform and how to change the organization structure to embrace the cloud better. Towards the end, do not miss our insightful discussion on Gregor’s law of excessive complexity!

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Gregor Hohpe’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.

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“Kanban is a flow strategy that helps you to optimize the flow of value through your value streams from ideation to customer."

Dimitar Karaivanov is a Lean-thinker, a Kanban practitioner, and the CEO and co-founder of Kanbanize. In this episode, Dimitar shared his story on how he got fascinated by the simplicity and the effectiveness of Kanban, which then led him to start Kanbanize. He shared in-depth the concept of Kanban and why Kanban becomes one of the most popular Lean practices. Dimitar then shared about the principles, practices, and anti-patterns behind Kanban, as well as tips on how companies can improve their Kanban practices, including dealing with external dependencies.

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Dimitar’s Bio

Dimitar has envisioned and brought to life the idea of Kanbanize aimed at solving problems in the way companies manage big initiatives spread across multiple teams. Through the success of his company, he has proven that Kanban can be used not just for change management, but also for product development. He is passionate about achieving extreme performance at scale and applying Lean / Kanban outside IT, and is an active member, supporter and promoter of initiatives within these communities.

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“A lot of engineers are unhappy and a lot of that has to do with not being able to control their environment, or even articulate what they want to have changed in the environment. By becoming a better communicator, you will also become happier."

Chris Laffra is an experienced and talented software engineer having worked in companies such as IBM, Google, and Uber. His wide variety of experiences ensures Chris understands what motivates engineers, what stresses them out, and how to help them get the most out of themselves. In this episode, Chris shared some insights from his book “Communication for Engineers” about why communication is such an important skill for engineers and how they should learn to improve it to become more impactful engineers. Chris also shared great insights and tips on how to deal with engineers’ typical sources of unhappiness–impostor syndrome, stress, and burnout–in order to become successful, productive, and happy engineers.

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Chris Laffra’s Bio

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“Micro-frontends are representations of business subdomains. We should differentiate them from components, because components are solving technical problems. Micro-frontends are looking from the product side on how you can create value in isolation for your users."

Luca Mezzalira is a Principal Architect at AWS, an expert on micro-frontends, and the author of the upcoming “Building Micro-Frontends” book. In this episode, Luca described the concept of micro-frontends in-depth, along with the where and when companies should apply this concept for building the frontends. Luca also shared about the principles behind micro-frontends, why it is important to be technology agnostic, and how to design the CI/CD pipelines. Luca also mentioned some of the common pitfalls and anti-patterns that we should avoid when using micro-frontends, as well as sharing his tips on how organisations can start adopting micro-frontends in their architecture.

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Luca Mezzalira’s Bio

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“Business agility is a set of organizational capabilities, behaviors, and ways of working that afford your business the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose, no matter what the future brings."

Evan Leybourn is the founder and CEO of Business Agility Institute. In this episode, Evan shared about the current maturity of agile adoption and how agile has matured over the years by looking at 3 different agility categories, including business agility. Evan then explained further what business agility means, and his interesting story of why he started the Business Agility Institute. He then explained in-depth the concept of business agility domains, a model comprising 12 different interacting domains across four dimensions centred around the customer. We then discussed his theory of agile constraints and Evan shared his insights on why he thinks Agile and DevOps transformations are currently hitting diminishing returns and how we should address it by continuously finding the constraint to solve. Evan also touched on and shared about the recent Business Agility Institute research finding on why many agile organizations unconsciously fail to embed and support Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) within the organizations.

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Evan Leybourn’s Bio

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“A lot of us in clinical practice always thought of technology as a tool. Today, technology has become not just a “what”, but it’s become a “how”. That means how you practice medicine can be enabled through technology itself."

Dr. Yong Chern Chet is the founding COO of a Southeast Asian region early stage digital health start-up headquartered in Singapore with a simple mission of enabling “Better Healthcare for All”. In this episode, Dr. Chet shared about the current challenges in healthcare and how technology can be used to overcome those challenges. He then shared about his 5C model that outlines the areas where technology can play a part in the digital healthcare, as well as the various technologies and adoption drivers that enable the future of digital healthcare.

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Dr. Yong Chern Chet’s Bio

Prior to this, Dr. Chet held various senior management roles leading innovation and digital transformation from within the healthcare industry and beyond. His corporate innovation achievements have been acknowledged via awards like the Enterprise Innovation Award at the 24th Asia IoT Business Platform for the use of Big Data and Machine Learning technology to enhance business operations and IDC’s Asia Pacific Digital Transformation Awards (DXa) 2018 under the Operation Model Master category for Thailand.

Early career experience included time in management consulting as the Healthcare Industries Sector Leader and a Director with the Risk Consulting Practice for Deloitte Southeast Asia. Dr. Yong is a qualified medical doctor trained in the field of surgery and orthopaedics.

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“Practices and principles are necessary and useful, but they should be informed by what the constraints are in the first place. We need to acknowledge the constraints, and then build and decide on practices and principles based on that."

Manuel Pais is the co-author of “Team Topologies” and a DevOps thought leader, focusing on team interactions, delivery practices, and accelerating flow. In this episode, Manuel shared great insights from his book “Team Topologies”, starting from highlighting some constraints that organizations typically face, such as Conway’s Law and cognitive load. Manuel then explained the 4 fundamental team topologies and how they are addressing those constraints. Manuel also shared about the Team API concept as well the 3 core interaction modes, which inform how teams should interact with each other in order to improve the overall flow within the business. Finally, Manuel shared some advice on how leaders can start implementing these ideas within their organizations.

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Manuel Pais’s Bio

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“Hybrid work is here to stay. It is going to continue. But we want to make sure that it comes in a way that’s equitable and everyone gets to experience the benefits of it."

Dr. Jenna Butler is a Visiting Research Fellow at Microsoft Research in the Productivity and Intelligence Team. She is also an adjunct Professor at Bellevue College in radiation therapy. In this episode, Dr. Jenna shared about the SPACE of developer productivity framework and how developer teams can use the 5 dimensions to measure and increase productivity. Dr. Jenna also shared about the New Future of Work research by Microsoft, especially on the impact of working from home on people and their well-being. Towards the end, Dr. Jenna also mentioned some predictions of the new future of work post COVID-19, that includes some of the upcoming and exciting tools and the potential societal impact of this new work environment.

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Dr. Jenna’s Bio

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