Amazing CTO | More happiness and success 🚀 19.1by Stephan SchmidtHappy Friday, This week’s insights include - 💬 3 Questions to Claudio Bredfeldt, Co-Founder and CTO at MYCS
- Using 🤖 GPT-3 to explain how code works
- Find the smartest technologist in the company and make them CEO
- Is remote actually 😂 enjoyable?
Good reading, nice weekend ❤️ and until next week, Stephan ⛅ CTO Job Market WeatherHow is the CTO job market? The US is flat, but Germany nearly doubled (!) to 61 open positions. “My contribution to productivity hacks: Be so focused on one thing that you don’t need a todo list” https://twitter.com/Amitmina/status/1546697263522516995 💬 3 Questions to Claudio Bredfeldt, Co-Founder and CTO at MYCS1. What makes a CTO amazing? Out of all mandatory skills such as business acumen, strategy, leadership, communication, and deep technical expertise, an amazing CTO is capable of getting together an extraordinary team of professionals, and distributing decision-making power among all team members to build an environment that is based on trust, meaning, and impactful results. An amazing CTO is skilled at providing context and able, at eye-level, to question the Why, and challenge the How to allow every expert to participate in the development and evolution of the company through technology. 2. What is the biggest challenge for a CTO? Successfully bridge the team the gap between business needs and tech requirements, so we can come up with meaningful tech solutions that are always available, scalable, and cost-effective. 3. What is your biggest learning from the last 6 months? Not just only from the last 6 months, but I am amazed to see at what pace tech solutions are becoming a commodity, and by how easy it has become to make usage of advanced solutions, that not long ago, were reserved for domain experts only. THANKS ClAUDIO for the answers! Stories I’ve encountered last weekUsing GPT-3 to explain how code works MUST READ. https://simonwillison.net/2022/Jul/9/gpt-3-explain-code/ And the reverse: Regex from English https://www.autoregex.xyz/ Find the smartest technologist in the company and make them CEO If you are a tech company, you need a technologist at the top, otherwise, you fail. The CEO of VW said one day a coder will be CEO. Marc Andreessen agrees. In my discussions with coachees, several are looking for a new job and will only join a techie CEO, sadly a rare unicorn in Germany. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/find-the-smartest-technologist-in-the-company-and-make-them-ceo?cid=other-eml-dre-mip-mck&hlkid=a774e1a8976d4a078406df70a8406fd5&hctky=1310368&hdpid=5fdae074-503e-4e6f-ad1a-503d2771ff1d Publishing your work increases your luck Everyone needs luck to succeed. But you can increase your luck by creating more opportunities for the luck to strike Luck = (Doing Things) * (Telling People). This goes for startups too. Especially in a time of hardship, the idea is to stay in the game. Only in the game luck can hit you. https://github.com/readme/guides/publishing-your-work Microsoft REST API Guidelines I didn’t know such a thing existed. As everyone I see does APIs the way they like, it’s a good idea for a large company like Microsoft to write API Guidelines. If you don’t have any, use these to guide your developers. I did rather like them. https://github.com/microsoft/api-guidelines/blob/vNext/Guidelines.md Unchecked AB Testing Destroys Everything it Touches This is so common. Product organizations doing A/B testing without a clue what they are doing, just to be “data-driven”. But it’s more like statistical noise driven.
This one is more about the short-term boost of the better performing variation of an A/B test than the bad long-term impact it might have. I have the same feeling. https://www.zumsteg.net/2022/07/05/unchecked-ab-testing-destroys-everything-it-touches/ Is remote actually enjoyable? Well, is it?! https://slite.com/blog/is-remote-actually-enjoyable Implementing faceted search with Django and PostgreSQL Another person using PostgreSQL for full-text search. I have been arguing for some time now for radical simplicity. Using PostgreSQL for more things (job queues, full-text search) reduces the number of things to learn and maintain. I’ve written a full-text search engine long before Lucene and used Elastic and SOLR for a long time. Today I would use PostgreSQL. https://simonwillison.net/2017/Oct/5/django-postgresql-faceted-search/ Also for more details Designing Arithmetic Circuits with Deep Reinforcement Learning You know, AI is one of my favorite topics here, as it will radically change software development, you’ll see! Here NVIDIA let deep learning optimize their new GPUs. “The latest NVIDIA Hopper GPU architecture has nearly 13,000 instances of AI-designed circuits.” How can you, as CTO, use AI (really deep learning) for your company? https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/designing-arithmetic-circuits-with-deep-reinforcement-learning/ Talking About Layoffs As some of you may need to lay off developers, some thoughts on being layed off. https://angelariggs.github.io/articles/talking-about-layoffs Microsoft researched what made employees truly happy. One result was startling Surprising, must read, change things. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-researched-what-made-employees-truly-happy-one-result-was-startling/ How Do Dolphins Choose Their Name? I needed to include this one “Drifting along ocean currents in their mother’s shadow, newborn bottlenose dolphins sing to themselves. They create a unique siren of squeaks, known as a signature whistle, which scientists have likened to a human name.” Mind blown. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-do-dolphins-choose-their-name The SOC2 Starting Seven Do you wonder about security in your department? What you should start with because you have no clue? Start here. https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/03/12/the-soc-starting.html |