Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 18.1

by Stephan Schmidt

Happy Friday,

This week’s insights include

• 💬 3 questions to Florian Klemt, Co-Founder & CTO of Fashion Cloud
• A 📚 book recommendation about taking back control as CTO
• Why DRY 🏜️ is often a bad programming principle
• How a fake 💼 job offer can kill your company

Good reading, nice weekend ❤️ and until next week,

Stephan

💬 3 Questions to Florian Klemt, Co-Founder & CTO of Fashion Cloud

1. What makes a CTO amazing?

An amazing CTO can connect all the dots and sees the bigger picture. They know when and why the expert in the team should step aside and show someone new how something is done. They know why code quality and technological improvements are not only important for the success of the product but can have a positive impact on recruitment. They know what is hype and what is relevant and that “Legacy Code” needs to be appreciated for the value it brings. And they know how the people in their team can constantly grow and stay engaged and excited. Just to name a few examples.

2. What is the biggest challenge for a CTO?

The biggest challenge is everything that can not be immediately measured and is based on the CTOs experience and expertise. You can not prove to your CEO why a technology or architectural upgrade is a good idea even though you know with every bone in your body that this is crucial for future success of the product. So finding a good way to communicate these highly technical decisions to non-technical decision-makers is difficult but important to master.

3. What is your biggest learning from the last 6 months?

It pays off to stay true to your vision and your learnings from the past and not fall for the seduction of shortcuts or “smarter ways” of doing something, especially in the current time of multiple crises at once (for talent, financial, war)

THANKS FLORIAN for the answers!

Stories I’ve encountered last week

Why DRY is the most over-rated programming principle

For a long time now I’ve argued against DRY. Too often DRY makes code hard to read and hard to understand with layers of abstraction. Often it’s better to just keep the code. Put this in your developers’ code review checklist!

https://gordonc.bearblog.dev/dry-most-over-rated-programming-principle/

EU Approves Landmark Legislation to Regulate Apple and Other Big Tech Firms

This road will save a lot of money for everyone who creates a mobile app and has huge impact on everyone who creates a mobile app.

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/05/eu-approves-landmark-legislation-to-regulate-apple/

How a fake job offer took down the world’s most popular crypto game

Wow, must-read, haven’t heard of that scheme “The fake ‘offer’ was delivered in the form of a PDF document, which the engineer downloaded — allowing spyware to infiltrate Ronin’s systems.”

https://www.theblock.co/post/156038/how-a-fake-job-offer-took-down-the-worlds-most-popular-crypto-game

Scaling our Spreadsheet Engine from Thousands to Billions of Cells

Very interesting read on performance, especially from moving from Javascript to Go and beyond.

https://www.causal.app/blog/scaling

Who Should Lead the Scrum Team?

This an interesting question by itself. Many assume the Scrum Team should be led by a product manager, as a product owner. Everyone assumes that the product owner should be a product manager. I disagree. But read the article.

https://d-pereira.com/who-should-lead-the-scrum-team/

Jim Keller: Arm vs x86 vs RISC-V - Does it Matter? [video]

I wrote a lot of 6502, Z80, and 68000 code back in the day, but I have no clue about modern CPUs (they have cores!) - This is an interesting short video on what one of the greatest CPU designers thinks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTMRGERZrQE

What Comes After Git

Yes, what comes after Git!?

https://matt-rickard.com/what-comes-after-git/

“Keep calm and use the runbook” – Why runbooks are the key to handling any situation effectively

Good explanation of what runbooks are and why YOU need them, yes you do.

https://www.cortex.io/post/keep-calm-and-use-the-runbook

Watching an acquirer ruin your company

Some of my coachees have been acquired. I have been acquired several times, as a CTO and co-founder. And I have the feeling most acquisitions fail, at least from an employee perspective. And if you are acquiring a company, as some of my coachees are doing, be double aware of the challenges.

https://startupwin.kelsus.com/p/watching-an-acquirer-ruin-your-company

📚 Book of the week

This week’s book is “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton M. Christensen. I urge every CTO to take back control over development and be amazing. One way to be amazing is by driving innovation. For a long time, a told CTOs “You’re not doing rocket science” to make them relax and see that their technical problems are small. Now it’s “You’re not doing rocket science!” to urge every CTO to do rocket science. Do work on technical innovation that drives the company, and not just be an execution machine for product management. There are many books about innovation, but if you read on, read the classic about technological innovation. The book argues on how disruptive technological innovation can sideline market leaders and turn markets upside down (E.g. from hard drives to SSDs). Must read for CTOs.