Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 Issue 14.1

by Stephan Schmidt

Happy Friday,

This week’s insights include

• 💬 3 questions to Garry Shutler, CTO at Cronofy
• A 📚 book recommendation about facts
• Why 👨‍💼 CEOs leave Silicon Vally
• The toxic productivity trap

Good reading, nice weekend ❤️ and until next week,

Stephan

💬 3 Questions to Garry Shutler, CTO at Cronofy

What does make a CTO amazing?

Having a clear vision and the ability to convey that to the team and wider business. The ability to drop down in the detail when necessary, but not lose site of the wider picture in the process.

What is currently the biggest challenge for a CTO?

People. It’s always people. We have ever more powerful tools available to us, but people as individuals and teams have to take advantage of them.

How do we develop software in 30 years?

Much the same as we do today in the abstract, but the primitives will be much more powerful. We can see this already in the shift towards “buy” more and more through APIs and services instead of defaulting to “build” everything in house.

THANKS GARY for the answers!

Stories I’ve encountered last week

Are You Suffering from Toxic Productivity?

What I see in too many startups. Read the text not as for individuals but organisations.

https://paperform.co/blog/toxic-productivity/

Cramer: Tech CEOs tell me they’re sick of spoiled Silicon Valley employees

“Jim Cramer [..] expects a “tech exodus” from California in the future, with one of the drivers being tech leaders’ dissatisfaction with their employees.” YES for you as CTOs, easier recruiting. Even when you’re in the valley.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/09/cramer-tech-ceos-tell-me-theyre-sick-of-spoiled-silicon-valley-employees.html

Imagine there’s no human error

The key to postmortems. Always imagine the human from before the incident looking into the future. The pilot didn’t want to crash the plane. The engineer didn’t want to bring down the website. It’s not “They made a bad decision” but “Why did they make that decision”.

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2022/05/30/imagine-theres-no-human-error/

Cache made consistent: Meta’s cache invalidation solution

As they say “There are only three hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” A deep dive into cache invalidation. The developer in me really enjoyed the read.

https://engineering.fb.com/2022/06/08/core-data/cache-invalidation/

Generating true random numbers from bananas

I didn’t know! I always eat them!

https://www.valerionappi.it/brng-en/

Thousands of UK workers begin world’s biggest trial of four-day week

More companies trying a 4-day week. Two coachees recently asked me about my opinion (I’m in favor!) and how to make it work. A 4-day week makes weekends meaningful and gets people hungry for creating back on Monday.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jun/06/thousands-workers-worlds-biggest-trial-four-day-week

An account from one of the companies:

https://www.beaconcrm.org/blog/beacon-switching-to-four-day-work-week

📚 Book of the week

This week’s book is “Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering” by Robert Glass. It’s from 2022. 20th year anniversary. It still stands as one of the few books in our profession that talks about facts instead of opnions, fashions and hypes. As software developers we need to put more decisions on facts instead of fashions. If you haven’t read the book, read it, there are still true points in it 20 years on (Recommended it to a coachee yesterday to solve a problem).