The CTO Podcast

Just how easy is DevOps? In this week’s show, Phil Borlin and Ken Cone, co-founders of SleepTight, share the answer. They join Etienne de Bruin to talk about the challenges that come with navigating a company's DevOps, and what developers should keep in mind. 
Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:
DevOps is the idea that developers need to be in charge of their own destiny. Therefore, somebody needs to be able to help them get to that point. 
"What we're trying to do is change the way people do computer science," Ken says. You don't have to flip the ones and zeros on the machines anymore because transistors do that. It's high time DevOps is that way for people who want to create value.
Your business should be unique in your market, but not in your ops nor your tech. 
Developers should understand their tools, but that doesn't mean they have to write their tools.
Continuous integration simply means that all the code that is being written is grouped together continuously. Trunk-based development is going back to this ideal and feature flags is wrapping all the code. 
Trunk based development, terraform and infrastructure are all important in approaches to code. Phil and Ken detail the steps and procedures that go into terraforming and building code infrastructure.
Resources
Phil Borlin | [email protected]
Ken Cone
SleepTight

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How do you build and maintain relationships? In this week’s show, Dr. Dan Stoneman, Executive Partner at Gardner and former CIO of the San Diego Unified District, dives deep into this idea. He joins Etienne de Bruin to talk about the role of psychology as a CTO and the importance of relationships. He tells listeners that we should not be so focused on outcomes that we no longer have people in our lives. 
Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:
When you’re texting the most important people in your life, Dan suggests, asking them what's special about their day instead of how they're doing. 
If you don't understand psychology and influence, you're not going to get anything done. While persuasion is programming people in a way, you can't do that the way you would program computers. Humans make decisions all on their own, so to be able to persuade them, you have to understand why they make the choices they do.
The three pillars of effective leadership are mastery, autonomy, and purpose. 
The best thing you can do as a leader is to step out of the way so your team can activate and harness their creativity to make the product better. 
How you interact and relate to your team is what drives productivity.
Years of experience will not necessarily translate into effective leadership. It takes communication, empathy, and a desire to transfer knowledge.
Resources
Dan Stoneman | LinkedIn 
Drive by Daniel Pink
The Destructive Hero | The New York Times
Netscape Time by Jim Clark

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com

What must exist for a community to be vibrant and healthy? In this week’s show, EJ Allen and TJ Taylor, CTO and Staff Engineer at Mobilize, answer this question. They join Etienne de Bruin to dig into trunk-based development, feature flags, and how community and personal connection drive business. 
Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:
Community is the tide that raises all boats. Building communities of trust and connecting with people can unlock potential for everyone. 
What it means to be part of a thriving community is the same across professional and personal networks. The key components of creating a vibrant network include trust, empathy, and unlocking potential. 
In software development, you must be able to take risks and be vulnerable with your team. This means that you essentially eliminate the consequences of making a mistake, allowing your team to experience psychological safety.
Building habits is one of the ways to create pits of success. That translates into looking at the habits of the people around you and figuring out how to leverage those habits to get the desired behavior. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. 
Think about how you're adding value to your customer. At the end of the day, your work is not necessarily as important as the work that your team is delivering to the customer.  
"Being able to get 1% better a day makes you 37 times better in a year. Try not to worry so much about what can I get done in a day or what can I get done this week… Instead, just focus on how can I deliver the smallest amount of value as consistently as possible?" 
You need every leg of the stool to be successful. That requires trust, empathy, and connection in your team. 
Resources
EJ Allen | LinkedIn 
TJ Taylor | LinkedIn 
Mobilize 
Refactoring by Kent Beck
Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com

This week’s show explores the importance of having a clear vision and crafting your code. David Heinemeier Hanssen, dhh, co-owner and CTO of 37signals, shares the story of his rise to the C-suite and the challenges he faced when starting the company. He joins Etienne de Bruin to discuss how his company has grown over time.

Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:

David considers himself a programmer, not an engineer. Engineer, he says, should be a protected title for people who actually have engineering degrees.

Most programming languages are not designed for the programmer but to contain and relegate the programmer as the “problematic character that’s driving it from behind the keyboard.”

David and his business partner were both students of bad businesses, getting a close-up view of what not to do, which later informed their decisions in building Basecamp. This valuable insight, along with their combined skill sets in programming, design, and business operations, allowed them to approach entrepreneurship from a unique lens. “We had a healthy degree of utter arrogance and exuberant ignorance, and through those things, a commitment to doing things from first principles,” he shares.

Once you've made enough money that no one can threaten your livelihood, you achieve a distinct degree of inner freedom that allows you to stand up for your principles. 

There are aspects of hardship that are good for you, and they will only make you stronger.

A lot of productivity is about realizing the value of doing nothing, and the value of not creating more. The inherent creation value in destruction and inaction is huge and should not be overlooked.

Resources

David Heinemeier Hanssen, dhh, on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter

Email Etienne: [email protected]

Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler

Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck

Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans

Refactoring by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler

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Is iterative growth more substantial than revolutionary growth? In this week’s show, Dave Mangot, Principal and founder of Mangoteque, explores this idea in depth. He joins Etienne de Bruin to talk about how companies find benchmarks to compare themselves to, and how his organization is holding up a mirror in this process.
Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:
The culture you cultivate at your company will endure for the company’s lifetime. 
When you’re looking for tools for your company's DevOps, pick the one that fits your company's culture the best. A tool that does most of what you want, and that fits in with your company culture, will have the highest rate of adoption. 
To have continuous improvement in your company, you need to plan as well as study. Development teams need to have a calendar, they need to study the projects that they are undertaking and decide whether or not they are feasible. 
As a leader, give yourself and your team permission to fail.
Be open to suggestions from your team members, and don't be quick to dismiss them. "That was a thinking, creative human being who spent time coming up with that. To dismiss it out of hand is probably not appropriate and certainly not great for team performance or team cohesion," Dave tells Etienne.  
Hiring more people when work isn't getting done is not going to fix anything. Throwing more people into a broken system isn't going to fix the broken system. Instead, look at the work that needs to be done. 
Resources
Dave Mangot LinkedIn | Twitter
Mangoteque

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“Large open source projects with many developers can sometimes feel like chaotic construction zones.” This week’s show is all about open-source communities. Jesse White, CTO and President of R&D at OpenNMS, joins Etienne de Bruin to define and describe open source communities, what they do, and how they work.
Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:
OpenNMS is an open-source network monitoring program intended to monitor large enterprises at scale.
How do you nurture a community that has strong feelings about where the product needs to go?
“I see my role as being as transparent as possible in painting a picture of where we're going as an organization and what impacts that has on the open source project that we have,” Jesse shares.
Sometimes when things go wrong inside an open source community, developers fork projects in different directions or start another community outright. 
If you’re thinking about contributing to an open-source community, you should start by asking around. You should also advocate for your own work - don’t seclude yourself in a silo and only come out when it’s ready. Let people know what you’re working on, and keep them posted. Even if there’s no response, people will see it and be aware.
The key to open source is the openness of code, disposition, and how you approach it. 
Resources
Jesse White on the Web | LinkedIn

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Do you dream of more harmony between product and engineering teams when releasing features? This week’s show dives deep into the world of features. Patricio Echague, CTO and co-founder of Split.io, shares how to avoid causing trauma to your engineering teams with pushes to production. He joins Etienne de Bruin to discuss the fundamentals of updating code in a way that empowers teams across your company.
Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:
As a CTO, whether you're at a highly scaled organization or just starting, the value you create is through the code you've written. In updating that code, trunk-based development is the way to go. 
Though you can use other branching techniques to use feature flags, they are more powerful when they are developed with a trunk-based methodology.
When using feature flags, you should start by placing them as high in the stack as possible and then moving them down as needed. If a feature flag has at least two conditions, two possible states, it gets exponential. This will create difficulty if you have to change many feature flags.
You can try to mitigate the animosity between product and engineering by giving them independence.
Any mature feature flag will help you identify when flags are no longer being engaged and used. 
If you have a monolith code base, you can move towards trunk based by peeling off areas of the monolith that haven't changed often and have a unit of domain, and then putting that into microservice and giving some teams autonomy to iterate on that service alone.
Resources
Patricio Echague on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter

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DEI isn’t just an organizational to-do; it’s about the day-to-day behavior in a company. Inclusion and Equity are the things we put into practice in our daily lives – how are we inclusive of people, and how do we ensure there is equity across the board? Today, Etienne de Bruin is talking to three experts in their fields, and in the leadership of major organizations who are taking DE&I seriously. Erik Enge is the Head of Engineering at Postmark, Active Campaign. Kathy Keating the VP of Technology at Ad Hoc, and Aaron Pina is the founder of Anthropolicy. They discuss what DE and I really means, how to make it an integral part of your company, and why that matters.
 
They discuss:
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion isn’t a set of checkboxes to tick off. The number of people of color or members of the LGBTQ community in your company doesn’t mean anything if their day-to-day experience of working in the organization isn’t inclusive. “If you focus on the I, the D will come.”
Psychological safety is important, but the idea of it has de-developed equity in North America. It has kept majority culture, particularly whiteness, from fully engaging in the process and practice of inclusion. Real psychological safety is something else.
Where do you start having conversations about people’s biases and resistance? Aaron recommends looking at skepticism and resistance as a signal for a story that needs to be told.
When you’re part of majority culture, what you find normal, pleasant, easy and conducive to success, it’s hard to imagine that others don’t have the same experience. Eric talks about this realization and how he acted on it.
Trust and safety doesn’t come from doing and saying everything perfectly, it comes from creating something new. Cathy shares that she feels safety comes from “that beautiful moment when we move from your needs, my needs and where it’s about us expressing our needs.”
Aaron talks about how the whole self doesn’t always belong at work, but spaces where you can be unapologetically yourself are vital. He recommends active bystander training and looking at how it can be applied in the world.
Fear is a feeling you can move through – it doesn’t have to be avoided, and it doesn’t have to stop you from making changes and doing the work.
What happens when you bring difference into your workplace ‘tribe’? It always creates friction but how you treat and respond to that friction dictates whether you grow and evolve or stagnate and eventually decay.
 
Resources
The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle 
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
Aaron Pina on LinkedIn Instagram
Anthropolicy Consulting
Kathy Keating on LinkedIn
Ad Hoc
Erik Enge on LinkedIn
Active Campaign

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“When your name is mentioned, what are the characteristics that people implicitly jump to in a millisecond?” This week’s show peels back the curtain on leadership, authenticity, and the role of a CTO. Sri Shivananda, CTO and EVP of Product and Platform Engineering at PayPal, joins Etienne de Bruin to discuss a variety of topics all centering around his experience as CTO. Sri explores building effective teams, the intricate inner workings of a company, and the impact of a brand. 
Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:
At the end of the day, leadership is really about building great teams. It’s not an act of one - it’s the act of many passionate people that come together. 
Communication channels are critical in leadership.
The CTO is the pulse for the customer. Their role allows organizations to continuously evolve the experiences both consumers and merchants have. 
Authenticity is foundational for creating trust in any relationship. It’s about ensuring that the way you express yourself and the way you interact with people is in harmony with your core value system. 
Leadership is about serving people, but it often gets clouded by worrying about what other people think. Concerns like, “Did I sound stupid?’ are common, but they ultimately don’t improve your leadership. It’s important that you give yourself permission to not be perfect.
You become much more productive collaboratively when you learn to stop judging things and people around you on a continuous basis.
People who have a habit of reflecting during the weekend have an advantage in going into a new week with new learning.
Within a company, the primary operating system involves the reporting relationships such as manager to employee, but the real information and work actually gets done through a secondary operating system of experts connecting with each other.
Networking is very important for both personal and professional growth.
Resources
Sri Shivananda on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter
PayPal

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com

“If you spend a ton of time cultivating your network, how are you leveraging that work in your current role?” This week’s show explores multiple ways to reap the rewards of building a strong professional network, and how this week’s guests tap into that. Etienne de Bruin welcomes Erin Fusaro, Wayne Haber and Brent Thumlert to the CTO Studio Podcast. Erin is VP of Engineering at Chipper Cash, a fintech company. Her role involves helping the company grow and scale sustainably. Wayne is VP of Engineering at GitLab, focusing on security, growth and machine learning. Their primary objective is increasing “revenue via growth experiments and growth hacking and also apply machine learning to make teams customers more efficient.” Brent is the Managing Director of Software and Technology at Radicle. “Our purpose is to help people find the balance between people, planet and profit, specifically around inventory and reducing their greenhouse gas emissions,” he tells Etienne. 
Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:
Who are you bringing to the table when you sit at the table? Having a strong network means that you bring more than just your expertise; you’re also bringing all the people you know and have influence over.
You can get objective feedback on new ideas from your network and enter new places at a high level of trust.
Maintaining a network of professionals who are as invested in personal development as you are is like “crowdsourcing mentorship”.
Relationship building is everything in networking.
“My network always wins,” Erin says. “That network is such a big part of my value as a leader … my network supersedes any job I have, because it is continuous across my career whereas I may work for a company for a period of time.”
“A healthy network creates knowns and predictability or removes uncertainty.” 
One way to keep relationships strong is to watch what you say publicly. 
How to measure the health of your network.
The power of community and group discussion. Using a personal Slack channel to keep in touch and simultaneously help one another expand their network.
Resources
Erin Fusaro on LinkedIn | Email
Brent Thumlert on LinkedIn | Email
Wayne Haber on LinkedIn 

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com