Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
đ 44.2by Stephan SchmidtHappy đ Sunday, this week a book fell on my desk, âCTO Excellence in 100 Daysâ https://www.ctoexcellence.com/. Heureka! You know my view, our industry is not professional enough and the CTOs I meet do not act professional enough (stand your ground!) or executive enough. So I was delighted to get a book for CTOs - we need to have more common ground as CTOs. But what I love about the book, there itâs not about scaling technology. Or organizations. Itâs not about the things that techies coming from a developer career think are important. Itâs about the really important things, like âUnderstand What Is Truly Important to Stakeholdersâ or what I also mentor âMaintain Trusting Relationshipsâ. Grab a copy! This week insights - 𦹠CTO Checklist
- đ¤ What I Learned At Stripe
- đť Things they didnât teach you about Software Engineering
Good reading, have a nice Sunday â¤ď¸ and a great week, Stephan
CTO-Coach and CTO-veteran If you only read one thingCTO Checklist Yes, Medium. But we do have not enough CTO knowledge, so give it a try. Many good points, just take three of them and implement them. I suggest âMarket your companyâ, âBuild momentum â make sure there is a constant stream of deliveryâ and âGive teams a budget where possible â push decision making downâ https://medium.com/@tom-neal/cto-checklist-1a2ef3d6502 Stories Iâve enjoyed this weekWhat I Learned At Stripe âDespite it being a very short stint in my career, what I learned at Stripe was nothing like I had experienced in more than 20 years in the industryâ Many of my coachees struggle with developers taking responsibility. Many make the mistake of making a team responsible (you need A++ players for that), Stripe uses DRI aka. Directly Responsible Individual. Highly recommended. https://steinkamp.us/post/2022/11/10/what-i-learned-at-stripe.html The lone developer problem Youâre the CTO, but have been the first coder in the startup? Then this is the article for you: âIâve observed that code written by a single developer is usually hard for others to work withâ There will be a drop in productivity when others try to understand your code, there will be a drop in productivity because developers need to be onboarded, there will be a drop in productivity because going from 1 developer to 2 is 100% increase, from 2 to 3 only 50% and from 3 to 4 only a 33% increase in productivity. And all these happen at the same time and confuse the business and the CEO. Pressure is increased, bad code gets written and the CTO is on a road of pain. https://evanhahn.com/the-lone-developer-problem/ How Duolingo reignited user growth Gamification. And as a user, Duolingo is the one company that nails emails. They send encouraging emails just at the right time. Many companies seem to send me emails randomly. In an earlier newsletter, I shared the practice of sending
emails when the user is usually logged in (and not hitting them at night). This one is a good read with good ideas. https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-user-growth Firecracker internals: a deep dive inside the technology powering AWS Lambda I think everyone knows Docker. Not enough people know Firecracker. For quite some time I try to find a project to try out. Perhaps you are luckier than me. https://www.talhoffman.com/2021/07/18/firecracker-internals/ LastPass says DevOps engineerâs hacked computer led to security breach in 2022 Whenever I talk to CTOs, they seem to neglect security. I understand the business pressure and if you donât have money and donât have users and donât have traction, itâs not the right time to think about security. But there is a point where it becomes necessary, and nearly everyone misses this point. And then a company that stores passwords for users lets security slip, so CTO, not everything is lost. But take a look. https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/27/lastpass-devops-engineers-hacked/ Things they didnât teach you about Software Engineering âDomain knowledge is more important than your coding skillsâ This is the reason as a manager I brought down a large site with my coding skills. And in another event pressured a junior into making a mistake that costed the company tens of thousands of euros. https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/things-they-didnt-teach-you/ ARM vs Intel on Amazonâs cloud: A URL Parsing Benchmark I thought that one interesting, x86 vs. ARM performance for servers. A limited benchmark, but every data point is to be welcomed. https://lemire.me/blog/2023/03/01/arm-vs-intel-on-amazons-cloud/ Work Less, Get More Done: Analytics For Maximizing Productivity When the CEO kicks you next time, âWorking Longer Hours Is Not A Competitively Defensible Advantageâ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/10/04/work-smarter-not-harder/ From Go on EC2 to Fly.io: +fun, â$9/mo If Iâd start a startup with some money, Iâd straight got to fly. So should you. https://benhoyt.com/writings/flyio/ The Power of âYes, ifâ: Iterating on our RFC Process If you have implemented architectural decision records, perhaps the next level is writing RFCs. âRFCs turn ideas into words. They force clarity: itâs hard to write an RFC unless youâre sure about what problemâ https://engineering.squarespace.com/blog/2019/the-power-of-yes-if How to Protect Your Career From a ChatGPT Future Itâs about different jobs, one of them being developers âThe only way out for developers is through expanding their vision beyond that of the tools made available to them. Why does something need to be coded? What does the end customer expect?â What about CTOs? https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/how-to-protect-your-career-from-chatgpt Let It Fail There was Joel on Software. Then we forgot everything. No, we relearn the basics in another cycle on rewrites (Joel from 2000, this one 23 years later, oh my do we have a short memory span) âQuickly I realized the business and engineering teams were on a collision courseâ. There are some good points in it though, the main one being âLet it failâ - I would like to see the business impact. The positive note from business getting the rewrite sounds to me like the classical overpromise and fail. But I wish them the best. https://www.maxcountryman.com/articles/let-it-fail How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice Banks. I hope youâre not one of them. https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7axa/how-i-broke-into-a-bank-account-with-an-ai-generated-voice đ Book of the weekThis weekâs book is - youâve guessed it - âCTO Excellence in 100 Daysâ https://www.ctoexcellence.com/. As mentioned above, I welcome every CTO, and I urge every CTO to read all those books, there are not enough of them. And when there is one like this, focusing on the important CTO topics that CTOs with a developer
background struggle with - go grab a copy. 
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