Tech Lead Journal

“Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on the system in order to increase your confidence that the system will survive difficult conditions."

Mikołaj Pawlikowski is an engineering lead at Bloomberg and the author of “Chaos Engineering: Site reliability through controlled disruption“. In this episode, Miko shared about what chaos engineering is, including clarifications on some of the common misconceptions. Miko also mentioned about the chaos engineering tools, steps and prerequisites to do chaos engineering, and the skill set required of a chaos engineer, and how we should explain the rationale and motivation behind chaos engineering to get the management buy-in. Towards the end, Miko also shared about chaos engineering for people; an interesting excerpt taken from his book, and his mission over the last few years to make chaos engineering boring.

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Mikołaj Pawlikowski’s Bio

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“Back when work from home became suddenly virtually overnight, it was all about enabling the business to continue. A lot of this move was rushed out of necessity, but the focus was on speed. The focus was not on security. And security took a backseat."

Tony Jarvis is a CISO advisor and cybersecurity strategist who has advised Fortune 500 clients across the world and served as a thought leader within the industry. In this episode, Tony shared about the importance of network and Operating System knowledge in cybersecurity, the awareness of and attitude towards cybersecurity in enterprises, as well as the security gaps arising from the pandemic. Tony also shared his career journey, including his mid-career crisis, as well as some tips and wisdom for those who are interested in cybersecurity.

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Tony Jarvis’s Bio

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“By and large, the way people put together the delivery process is by gut and instinct. The next step up from there is to use the data that comes out of your system to help you make the right decisions. When I say data-driven DevOps, don’t rely on this human experience, and let the system tell you. We should be able to find that kind of information from data."

Kohsuke Kawaguchi is widely known as the creator of Jenkins and currently is the co-CEO & co-founder of Launchable. In this episode, Kohsuke shared about data-driven DevOps, developers productivity, the future of software testing, and why he created Launchable to help us move closer to achieve those. And in the beginning of the episode, Kohsuke shared his story on how he created Hudson during his time at Sun Microsystems, which eventually led to become Jenkins, the most popular open-source CI/CD tool used by millions.

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Kohsuke Kawaguchi’s Bio

Kohsuke has received the O’Reilly Open-source Award, JavaOne Rockstar, Japan OSS Contributor Award, and Rakuten Technology Award.

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“Technology is really impacting our daily life, sometimes without us knowing, and it’s important that we start understanding or relearning what is ABCDEFG. In the future of business, or future of work, there are many use cases of technology that are non-traditional, non-techie people need to learn and know how to use them."

Jim Lim is the founder of the socio-techno network 59stVentures, the healthcare sector lead for NCS, and previously the CEO of Good Doctor Technology. In this episode, I had a fun conversation with Jim to redefine ABCDEFG, which is a shorthand for a set of modern immersive technologies that are rapidly affecting our daily life, sometimes without us even knowing. ABCDEFG stands for AI, Blockchain, Cloud, Data, Ecosystem, and 5G. Jim also shared with me his unique multicultural career journey and the reasons why he started 59stVentures as a way to pay it forward and contribute back to the society.

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Jim Lim’s Bio

Before Good Doctor, Jim was the Global Senior Director in Group Chief Transformation Office in Huawei Technologies and its Regional Chief Technology Officer for strategic digital transformation projects in APAC, focussing on digital transformation cross industries (e.g. Telco, Smart Nation/City, Retail, Healthcare, Logistics, Agriculture), domains (e.g. Cloud, IoT, Big Data, Mobile Money, Connectivity) and aspects (e.g. Business Modelling, Customer Journey, Design Thinking, Org. Change).

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“Tech Capital is about creating something that enables things that weren’t possible before, that genuinely helps the business and enables other people in your organization, and those are the kind of stuffs that eventually end up paying long term."

Aviv Ben-Yosef is an advisor and consultant for tech executives to help them create world-class engineering teams. In this episode, Aviv shared with me in-depth about “The Tech Executive Operating System“, his latest book for first-timers and veteran tech leaders to maximize their leverage, which includes the axioms of tech leadership, producing Tech Capital to drive value vs obsessing about tech debt, shifting the engineers mindset to create impact by adopting “Coders Without Borders“ mentality, moving up the decision stream to increase leverage, how to create impact within the organization, importance of product mastery, and organizational debt. Towards the end, Aviv also explained why we should not forget to put more emphasis on product-oriented engineers, instead of principal engineers who focus solely on just the tech.

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Aviv Ben-Yosef’s Bio

Aviv’s mission is to help create world-class engineering teams that achieve the unthinkable by upgrading tech from a tool to part of the strategy, amassing Tech Capital, and creating Coders without Borders. In his work as a consultant, Aviv has developed a unique approach to aid software organizations’ leadership. Aviv’s online writing has reached over six million readers, and his publishing includes multiple blogs, podcasts, videos, and online courses. He is the author of The Tech Executive Operating System, a book for first-timers and veteran tech leaders who seek to maximize their leverage.

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“Lean Inception is about aligning a group of people to be successful. It’s about aligning the vision and the MVP from three different angles: the business, the users, and the engineers, so they align and decide what is the very first step."

Paulo Caroli is a Principal consultant at Thoughtworks, co-founder of Agile Brazil, and the author of the best-seller Lean Inception and the recent FunRetrospectives. In this episode, Paulo shared in-depth with me about Lean Inception, its connection with Lean Startup movement, the similarities and differences with Design Sprint, how to create a good product vision, MVP canvas, and also the importance of shifting our mindset from project to product. In the second half of our conversation, Paulo shared his latest contribution, FunRetrospectives, which brings together many techniques to conduct effective retrospectives. He explained the reasoning behind the fun techniques, shared some of those fun activities, and also emphasized the importance of psychological safety and facilitation skills in a retrospective.

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Paulo Caroli’s Bio

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“A high-performing team is one that gets to spend almost all of their time solving interesting problems that move the business forward. Not doing a lot of toil. Not working on things they have to do in order to get to the things they want to do."

Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, the observability tools for engineering teams to debug production systems faster and smarter. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about building high-performing teams by having observability and CI/CD as the critical pillars to support it. We opened up our discussion discussing what observability is and how Honeycomb helps to provide observability for distributed systems compared to the other monitoring tools available. Charity then shared her strong views on how to build high-performing teams by focusing on Continuous Delivery, the sociotechnical aspects of the team, and the 5th key metric as her addition to the widely known DORA metrics. Towards the end, we discussed the engineer/manager pendulum, how one should be conscious about it, and that we should not treat going into management as a promotion or a one-way street.

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Charity Majors’s Bio

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“One of the technological opportunities that we have taken during the pandemic has been transforming the mindset to thinking on products, to thinking on platforms. And I think that’s the foundations of the super app."

Pablo Sanz is the CTO of AirAsia. In this episode, Pablo shared with me the tough challenges that AirAsia had to go through during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and how it has to pivot and transform in order to survive. He explained what the AirAsia leadership team did to align the company vision and steer the business and technology roadmaps during the challenging situations while keeping the people’s morale high. Pablo also shared the recent AirAsia ambition and transformation as a company from being a traditional airline company into becoming a digital platform and ASEAN super app, and how he envisioned to build a data-driven product engineering culture within AirAsia and to continue coming up with innovations based on data-driven hypotheses.

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Pablo Sanz’s Bio

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“Developer productivity is not lines of code written. It’s not the number of commits. It has to do with the ultimate problem you’re solving and the users that you’re solving it for."

Beyang Liu is the CTO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, a developer tools company that brings universal code search capability for developers. In this episode, Beyang shared with me his perspective about developers’ productivity and how we should go about measuring developers’ productivity, including the danger of measuring productivity by using proxy metrics. We then discussed the rationale for universal code search and why he thinks there is a massive need for it to increase developers’ productivity, borrowing from his experience working at Google, and especially to cope in the current era of “Big Code”. Towards the end, Beyang shared how individuals can improve their personal developer productivity and what the future state of developer tools would look like. Also, listen to some of the Sourcegraph cool use cases that Beyang shared based on the feedback given by his customers.

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Beyang Liu’s Bio

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“Simplicity is an experience that makes things easy for users that leaves positive emotions."

Jin Kang Møller is an award-winning customer experience strategist, design practitioner, and the author of “The Simplicity Playbook for Innovators“. She was the driving force behind FRANK by OCBC and OCBC OneWealth app that won her a Singapore Good Design Mark Gold award in 2017.

In this episode, Jin shared with me her insightful perspectives on simplicity and how simplicity naturally leads to innovation. She shared with me in-detail her powerful framework, “Simplicity Diamond“, that is extremely powerful to help us embrace simplicity in dealing with different aspects of business practices, products and services. She also shared her point of view on agile and design thinking, and how we can combine both methodologies together in order to solve the right problems for our customers and users. And don’t miss her fun sharing on “pain sponge” that provides a great mindset analogy for delivering better customer experience!

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Jin Kang Møller’s Bio

Her design methodologies have helped wealth management, private & retail banking and insurance businesses to drive successful customer experience and digital transformation initiatives, and won her a Singapore Good Design Mark Gold award in 2017.

She is the author of The Simplicity Playbook for Innovators, a battle-tested strategy and the collection of tools to drive innovation, humanise digital transformation and to win customers’ hearts.

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