Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 32.1

by Stephan Schmidt

Happy ☀ Sunday,

This week’s insights

• 🍹 The retreat to comforting work and the impact on development
• ☁ Cloud Development Environments Tame Complexity By Reducing State
• 🥅 My take on why goal cascades are harmful and what to do instead

Good reading, have a nice Sunday afternoon ❤️ and until next week,

Stephan

If you only read one thing

Reminiscing: the retreat to comforting work.

I do think Will is the most important thinker in software development, the Joel Spolsky of the 2020s. Another nugget with great insights here: “Beyond snacking, which can be valuable when it helps you manage your energy levels, there is a similar pattern that happens when a business or individual goes through a difficult moment: under pressure, most people retreat to their area of highest perceived historical impact” (Also read all his books!)

https://lethain.com/reminiscing/

Stories I’ve learned something this week

My take on why goal cascades are harmful and what to do instead

Excellent excellent article about finding goals. It adresses the point I often make, on how top down goals are often too specific.

https://jchyip.medium.com/my-take-on-why-goal-cascades-are-harmful-and-what-to-do-instead-e9ebadd44d4a

Variability, Not Repetition, is the Key to Mastery

I’ve enjoyed this one as a weekend read. Often people argue mastery is from repetition. I haven’t thought about it yet, but thinking about it the article might be right, that mastery is from variability. My mastery of coding comes from writing code in 20+ programming languages. When I teached coding a long time ago, I did the same problem in several programming languages with the students. After the third time they saw the picture and said “Everything is the same, Python, C and Java”. Yes! You see the differences, then everything is the same, then you see the differences again.

For your hiring: Better codes might be those with more programming languages, not the one with 10 years of Python

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/10/26/variable-mastery/

Cloud Development Environments Tame Complexity By Reducing State

Are cloud development environments the next big things? The do decrease complexity and onboarding and setups are much faster. Kent Beck thinks “More important, I suspect, will be all the programs that folks will try writing because they are no longer afraid of wasting another 4 hours before giving up. One of those programs that wouldn’t have been started will turn out to be exceedingly valuable.”

https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/cloud-development-environments-tame-complexity-by-reducing-state-4a154ea7959f

Code Red: the Business Impact of Code Quality

My take on quality: Everyone is responsible and developers drive quality. As a CTO never compromise on quality (which is not gold plating) - “No shortcuts” is an engineering value I had to learn the hard way and which is with me for a long time now.

Good article, but never use the word “technical debt” outside of technology

If you want to read the paper the article is based upon, here it is.

https://www.infoq.com/articles/business-impact-code-quality/

Doing what you love when the money won’t follow

The article argues to do what you love even if money doesn’t follow. My advice to CTOs is do the things they love and structure their CTO job around it. And money will follow. Too often I see CTOs struggle with things they don’t like. Why not hire someone to do these things? A coachee loves R&D and is a genius. Why not make this am asset and hire a VP of Engineering to keep the department running while doing what he is good at and loving? “And so, the advice I would give to young people is this: structure your life so that you have the time and money to do what you love.” Amen. It took me 50 years to arrive at that point.

https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2022/06/doing-what-you-love-when-the-money-wont-follow/

Ephemeral DB, a sacrificial database line for high-throughput data

Interesting concept, haven’t heard it articulated that way before, worth a read.

https://brandur.org/fragments/ephemeral-db

Phylum Discovers Dozens More PyPI Packages Attempting to Deliver W4SP Stealer in Ongoing Supply-Chain Attack

Someone changes a packages to include malware. We need 2FA-PGP signed packages to detect changes in ownership in our supply chains. As a CTO this is something you need to know about and learn the details of, the article is a good start and while it’s about Python, the same goes for Javascript or Java. Some mind blowing things: *"[…], the attacker changed tactics slightly, and instead of just dumping the import in an obvious spot, it was placed waaaaay off screen, taking advantage of Python’s seldomly used semicolon to sneak the malicious code onto the same line as other legitimate code."

https://blog.phylum.io/phylum-discovers-dozens-more-pypi-packages-attempting-to-deliver-w4sp-stealer-in-ongoing-supply-chain-attack

Formalizing our Engineering Principles

While I do endorse formalizing engineering principles, and the article makes some good points, I’d argue against “We decided to create a working group to discover and formalize Cash’s Engineering Principles” To me engineering principles need to come down from the top, from the CTO with input from all developers. Without that your side is often not reflected in them and top management loses interest. And their principles are leaving out important points. But I would be curious to listen in and see how these principles are followed.

https://code.cash.app/formalizing-our-engineering-principles

Things your manager might not know

Your manager might not know some things, I’d argue most things. I always argue for managing up, for managing and helping your CEO. The article makes some great points “Here are the facts your manager might not know about you and your team […] What’s slowing the team down, How to help you get better at your job, What your goals are, What issues they should be escalating” Also: Explain to your direct reports that you don’t know things! I’ve experienced this to be a super power by saying “I might be wrong, tell me”

https://jvns.ca/blog/things-your-manager-might-not-know/

Events: Fat or Thin

I’ve been wondering about this for 20+ years and still have no answer. 20 years ago I wrote some articles about the domain of a shared bus, who ownes it?

https://codesimple.blog/2019/02/16/events-fat-or-thin/

On Feeling Competent

Read this and think about it as a reason why some people do not apply to your job offers. Change the job offers.

https://anja.kefala.info/on-feeling-competent.html

👻 All your old tech is haunted, actually

“You own a haunted bit of technology. I guarantee it.” 👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻

https://therectangle.substack.com/p/all-your-old-tech-is-haunted-actually

WHAT IS CODE?|

Still a funny read. Thinking about developers and CTOs from a business perspective.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/

Layers of Change: How Buildings and Software are Alike

“In effect, you were buying a lot with a building to demolish. So it wasn’t a $500k house. It was a multi-million dollar and multi-year project.” Just like software.

https://medium.com/@glenn.sorrentino/layers-of-change-how-buildings-and-software-are-alike-faa8e644e9e8

The Most Important Partnership

I though it was only me! “One of the most common complaints I hear when coaching and advising tech executives is about Product.”

https://avivbenyosef.com/the-most-important-partnership/