If you only read one thingYour First Year as a CTO: A Comprehensive Guide (15 minute read) A lot of good points, worthy read. Itās good to make a plan when you get a new job instead of just stumbling in. What I want to add: One year is too long. Major changes need to be addressed in the first three months. You learn about everything in the first two months, then think what needs to be done, then announce it and do it. With three months in, youāre still āthe new one.ā The CEO trusts you and wants you to change things, to make them more successful. After six months, youāre one of them; everyone then resists the change that you bring. There is only a small window of opportunity for real change in the beginningāit can be done later, and Iāve done it, but itās much more difficult. https://medium.com/@jsteyn/your-first-year-as-a-cto-a-comprehensive-guide-99a441715aaf CTO Job MarketWeekly search on the open positions for CTOs in the US, Germany and the UK. So you can find out if itās a good time to look out for a new job. Source payscale.com, Indeed.com Search: +title:cto
+title:"chief technology officer" Stopwords: staff, assistant, assistenz, analyst, werkstudent, stabsstelle,
clinical, partner, team, office of, audit, tax, worker, supervisor, cto office, coach, advisor, associate, audit ## š„ Video of the week[Video] Problem solving across 100,633 lines of code | Gemini 1.5 Pro (3:14 minute read) What happens when the LLM can digest all of your code first. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSnsmqIj1MI Image of the week
From: Falsehoods Junior Developers believe about becoming Senior (19 minute read) Iāve smiled a lot while reading this. āā Expectation: Being senior means I can avoid all the boring tasks. ā Reality: Endless meetings, documentation, and code reviewsā¦ Oh, and did I mention debugging legacy systems on Friday at 6 PM?ā Because it not only is about senior developers, but CTOs. āOh when Iām CTO ā¦ā https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/falsehoods-junior-developers-believe-about-becoming-senior/</span
Stories Iāve enjoyed this weekHow to strive for simplicity in an legacy environment (10 minute read) From one of the top CTOs: Simplicity. Easier when youāre small, difficult in a legacy environment. Many, many good points like āStart with the Whyā. Iāve seen several CTOs drop out of the game because they canāt manage their tech zoo. First stop digging. āTech Radar & Portfolio Management: Clearly outline which technologies are recommended and how new technologies can be introduced responsibly.ā Stop creating more complexity as the first step towards more simplicity. About Y Combinatorās Software Team (5 minute read) This was interesting, because itās a job ad without being a job ad. Everyone thinks for some reason jobs ads - even on your website - need to be one format. No, they donāt. And yes, storytelling always works best. So go, change the job ads on your website NOW. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39432015 Stress Reduction Techniques for High Stress Operations (9 minute read) Usually I donāt have sleeping problems. When I had them, advice from US Special Operations helped me: Relax your face muscles. When reading that, for the first time I recognized that my face muscles are not relaxed when lying in bed. So you can learn from the US military. And this advice about reducing stress in high-stress situations is the sameāremember the next time the website is down, or you are hacked, or the founder is shouting in your ear. Steve Jobs adopted a no ābozosā policy and said the best managers are those who never wanted the jobāhere are his 3 best management tips (6 minute read) This is what I see in too many startups. This is the point where many do fail for this exact reason: āWhen Jobs and Appleās other cofounders, including Steve Wozniak, first realized how big their company would be, they decided to go out and hire what they called āprofessional management,ā or folks who just knew how to manage people. But it quickly backfired. āIt didnāt work at all,ā Jobs said in a 1985 interview. āMost of them were bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didnāt know how to do anything.āā They hire professionals, who bring their own ideas that derail the company, who build their own kingdoms and hinder cooperation, who hire more expensive professionals. And when coachees ask me whom to make team leads: "āYou know who the best managers are. Theyāre the great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as that,ā Jobs said in the same interview." https://www.aol.com/finance/steve-jobs-adopted-no-bozos-130000644.html Netlify just sent me a $104K bill for a simple static site (6 minute read) So, metered hosting, a Ddos attack and a $104k bill for what was meant to be a free service. Once as CTO licensing for a product we used was going from below $100k to above $500k. I did manage that, but I should have been fired for not managing that risk. Do you manage these cost risks? What product do you have that you pay for and absolutely need, and that could go 10x costs YoY? What metered service could explode with a Ddos attack? One time, our invoice for a log aggregation service spikes above $100k for a month. Lucky me, the company waved away most of the costs. But could have gone differently. https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1b14bty/netlify_just_sent_me_a_104k_bill_for_a_simple/ How I turned my open-source project into a business (8 minute read) What I found interesting are several things. Not the change of the business model. But the increase in prices without repercussions (Everyone is too cheap, your startup most probably too). And the change in license. Purists donāt like it, and you will get lots of bad press, in the end, itās the money that counts. Donāt be afraid to do unpopular things when your position is strong enough (donāt do them from a weak position ;-) https://docs.emailengine.app/how-i-turned-my-open-source-project-into/ There is more than ChapGPT, Meta and Google in available LLMs. https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large/ š¦ The 14 pains of building your own billing system (10 minute read) When I was CTO of eventsofa, weāve built our own billing system. We got the first customers signed up and didnāt have a billing system in placeāso we needed to come up with something basic very fast to send out the first invoices. The benefits were clear: A Hundred percent automation of invoices, payment reminders, partial repayments, upgrades with differential payments, etc. Automation let us scale with few people. We could implement upsell and add-on packages as we wanted, the way we wanted. Getting the system running with all the edge cases in a legal way was daunting though. Iād say, start with using a billing of the shelf, and at some point with enough revenue, roll your own: Donāt give money away and structure your pricing and products in away to scoop up all the market is willing to pay. https://arnon.dk/the-14-pains-of-billing/ ā68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice ā by Kevin Kelly (11 minute read) āLearn how to learn from those who disagree with you or even offend you. See if you can find truth in what they believe.ā Iām always telling people, something that you disagree with is the best chance to learn something new. If something sounds ridiculous, dig deeper. https://www.neil.blog/full-speech-transcript/68-bits-of-unsolicited-advice-by-kevin-kelly AI Infrastructure Landscape (5 minute read) The AI tool and infrastructure space is exploding. This is as important as knowing Typescript and React, Postgres and Kafka five years ago. Quick Riff on Narrative Strategy (10 minute read) Excellent read. Strategy is most important, or youāre lost in a never ending rat race of opportunity chasing. Story telling is important. The manager is the new shaman, explaining why the sun goes up and the moon goes down and everyone goes āAh, okā. What I donāt agree is with this approach as a consultant, āI start by reading about the company and interviewing founders, employees, board members, customers, and partnersābasically anyone with skin in the game and a unique point-of-view on the business. Then I synthesize what I learn into an essay about why these particular people are seeking to solve this particular problem in this particular wayā If you let a consultant write your vision, youāre toast. Stop, get a job at a large company. https://tomcritchlow.com/2024/02/16/narrative-strategy/ console.delight (13 minute read) Been a frontend developer for ~30 years now. Didnāt know console.log can output anything different than a text. As developer experience (aka DX) is getting more important, have good-looking and colorful log messages, so itās a delight for developers to look into the console (and itās errors!āthey never do). And there is Doom in the Browser console https://github.com/MattCozendey/doom-console-log of course. https://frontendmasters.com/blog/console-delight/ I Spent a Week With Gemini Pro 1.5āItās Fantastic (8 minute read) A very good text to explain the different impact of window/token size for LLMs. Must read. https://every.to/chain-of-thought/i-spent-a-week-with-gemini-pro-1-5-it-s-fantastic If this works it is fantastic, code never has enough documentation. If it creates documentation that ChatGPT adds to code it generates - explaining the code line - itās worthless. Need to try this one out. Gen Z are treating employers like bad dates: 93% ghost interviews and 87% have not even shown up for their first day of work (9 minute read) Ghosting is the new black. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gen-z-treating-employers-bad-121633798.html?guccounter=1 I Ended Up with Just 0.15% of My Own Startup (8 minute read) Seen this several times. If you only own a small portion of a startup, it will be diluted away. One trick is increasing capital. I once saw this early in my career. Three people founded a startup, two rich, one not so. The one ānot soā was acting as CEO without a salary, ābecause of the company.ā After a year, when the CEO got the company working, the rich founders increased capital in a way the ānot soā couldnātāeven with a credit. He was left owning nothing of the company. Not sure if there is learning in there for you though. Hopefully not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39410364 Book Recommendation: The Checklist ManifestoIām a huge fan of checklists. Professionals use Checklists in environments when lots of things need to be correct. Like surgeons or pilots. Must read book for CTOs for more checklists. Do you have a code review checklist? Or a checklist for introducing new technologies? Or a checklist for incident management? This book gave me many insights.
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