Tech Lead Journal

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#90 - Clean Craftsmanship - Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) May 30, 2022

Show notes

“The simplest way to describe craftsmanship is pride of workmanship. It is the mindset that you are working on something important and you are going to do it well."

Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob) is the co-founder of cleancoders.com, an acclaimed speaker at conferences worldwide, and prolific author of multiple best-selling books. In this episode, Uncle Bob shared some insights from his latest book, “Clean Craftsmanship”. He first started by sharing the current major challenge of the software development industry, i.e. as a young discipline, it suffers from the state of perpetual inexperience amid exponential acceleration of demand for programmers, which drove Uncle Bob writing the book to help define disciplines, standards and ethics for software craftsmanship. He then touched on the five key disciplines of clean craftsmanship, specifically focusing on test-driven development and refactoring. Towards the latter half, Uncle Bob described a few essential standards and ethics of clean craftsmanship, such as never ship s**t, always be ready, do no harm, and estimate honestly.

Listen out for:

Career Journey - [00:07:29]
Clean Craftsmanship - [00:10:54]
Programmer as a Profession - [00:15:31]
Craftsmanship - [00:18:46]
Disciplines - [00:22:45]
Disciplines: Test-Driven Development - [00:28:50]
Disciplines: Refactoring - [00:34:32]
Code Coverage - [00:39:02]
Standard: Never Ship S**t - [00:42:35]
Standard: Always Be Ready - [00:47:16]
Ethics: Do No Harm - [00:50:01]
Ethics: Estimate Honestly - [00:53:56]
2 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:57:50]

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Robert C. Martin’s Bio
Robert Martin (Uncle Bob) has been a programmer since 1970. He is the co-founder of the online video training company cleancoders.com and founder of Uncle Bob Consulting LLC. He served as Master Craftsman at 8th Light inc and is an acclaimed speaker at conferences worldwide. He is a profilic writer and has published hundreds of articles, papers, blogs, and best-selling books including: “The Clean Coder”, “Clean Code”, “Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices”, and “Clean Architecture”. He also served as the Editor-in-chief of the C++ Report and as the first chairman of the Agile Alliance.

Follow Uncle Bob:

Twitter – @unclebobmartin
Clean Coder – http://cleancoder.com
Clean Coders – https://cleancoders.com
GitHub – https://github.com/unclebob

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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/90.

#89 - Code That Fits in Your Head - Mark Seemann May 23, 2022

Show notes

“The goal of software is often to sustain an organization. An organization invests in software in order to achieve some goal and hopefully to sustain itself in helping it achieve that goal."

Mark Seemann is an acclaimed author, international speaker, and a highly experienced developer. In this episode, Mark shared some insights from his latest book, “Code That Fits in Your Head”, on how to write sustainable software and manage software complexity. Mark first started by sharing why he wrote this book and explained why software development is hard. He also pointed out the difference between software engineering and other physical engineering disciplines, especially on the set of constraints. Mark then explained the importance of writing sustainable software and shared the perspective that code is a liability instead of an asset. Towards the end, Mark shared about the Rule of 7 as a guideline to manage code complexity and a few practices we can use to build sustainable software, such as checklist, vertical slice, x-driven development, and command query separation.

Listen out for:

Career Journey - [00:06:26]
Code That Fits in Your Head - [00:07:49]
Software Development is Hard - [00:10:55]
Software Engineering vs Physical Engineering - [00:15:01]
Sustainable Software - [00:17:58]
Code is a Liability - [00:19:55]
Rule of 7 - [00:22:43]
Checklist - [00:31:23]
Vertical Slice - [00:35:52]
X-Driven Development - [00:39:47]
Command Query Separation - [00:45:07]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:49:38]

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Mark Seemann’s Bio
Mark Seemann is a bad economist who’s found a second career as a programmer, and he has worked as a web and enterprise developer since the late 1990s. As a young man, Mark wanted to become a rockstar, but unfortunately had neither the talent nor the looks – later, however, he became a Certified Rockstar Developer. He has also written a Jolt Award-winning book about Dependency Injection, given more than a 100 international conference talks, and authored video courses for both Pluralsight and Clean Coders. He has regularly published blog posts since 2006. He lives in Copenhagen with his wife and two children.

Follow Mark:

Website – https://blog.ploeh.dk
Twitter – @ploeh
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ploeh

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#88 - Observability Engineering - Liz Fong-Jones May 16, 2022

Show notes

“Observability is a technique for ensuring that you can understand novel problems in your system. Can you understand what’s happening in your system and why, without having to push a new code by slicing and dicing existing telemetry signals that are coming out of your system?"

Liz Fong-Jones is the co-author of the “Observability Engineering” book and a Principal Developer Advocate for SRE and Observability at Honeycomb. In this episode, Liz shared in-depth about observability and why it is becoming an important practice in the industry nowadays. Liz started by explaining the fundamentals of observability and how it differs from traditional monitoring. She explained some important concepts, such as the core analysis loop, cardinality and dimensionality, and doing debugging from a first principle. Later, Liz shared the current state of observability and how we can improve our observability by doing observability driven development and improving our practices based on the proposed observability maturity model found in the book.

Listen out for:

Career Journey - [00:05:44]
Observability - [00:06:30]
Pillars of Observability - [00:09:57]
Monitoring and SLO - [00:12:28]
Core Analysis Loop - [00:15:06]
Cardinality and Dimensionality - [00:18:41]
Debugging from First Principle - [00:21:20]
Current State of Observability - [00:26:49]
Implementing Observability - [00:30:20]
Observability Driven Development - [00:36:53]
Having Developers On-Call - [00:39:06]
Observability Maturity Model - [00:41:59]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:44:10]

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Liz Fong-Jones’s Bio
Liz is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 17+ years of experience. She is an advocate at Honeycomb for the SRE and Observability communities, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights. She lives in Vancouver, BC with her wife Elly, partners, and a Samoyed/Golden Retriever mix, and in Sydney, NSW. She plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights.

Follow Liz:

Twitter – @lizthegrey
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/efong/
Website – https://www.lizthegrey.com/
GitHub – https://github.com/lizthegrey

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#87 - Learning to Program With Exercism and Building Employee Culture With Kaido - Jeremy Walker May 09, 2022

Show notes

“You don’t know what you don’t know. So when you’re learning something, it’s very hard to identify your own knowledge gaps, especially if you’re a programmer and you’re moving from one language to another."

Jeremy Walker is the co-founder of Exercism and Kaido. In this episode, Jeremy first shared about Exercism, a not-for-profit online platform for learning different programming languages. He explained the importance of programming in the idiomatic way, the role of mentorship when learning new languages, and shared his experiences running Exercism as one of the largest open source program, such as how to get consensus and how to run remote distributed teams. Later, Jeremy then talked about Kaido, an employee culture platform for building happier, healthier, and better connected teams. He shared how companies could strive to do more to build company culture before then shared some practical tips on how we can improve our personal wellbeing.

Listen out for:

Career Journey - [00:05:08]
Exercism - [00:08:24]
Programming in Idiomatic Way - [00:11:34]
Mentorship When Learning Languages - [00:13:52]
Inclusiveness & Equality - [00:17:04]
Running Large Open Source - [00:21:19]
Getting Consensus - [00:27:11]
Running Remote Distributed Teams - [00:30:42]
Kaido for Wellbeing and Culture - [00:37:00]
Tips on Personal Wellbeing - [00:43:40]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:49:13]

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Jeremy Walker’s Bio
Jeremy Walker is the co-founder of Exercism and Kaido. He is a software developer and entrepreneur who has been building tech businesses and not-for-profits for over 15 years. He is passionate about building great places to work and creating opportunity through education. In his space time he boulders and gets geeky about coffee.

Follow Jeremy:

Exercism – https://exercism.org/
Kaido – https://kaido.org/
Twitter – @iHiD
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ihidjeremywalker/
GitHub – https://github.com/ihid

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#86 - Adaptive Systems with Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design, and Team Topologies - Susanne Kaiser May 02, 2022

Show notes

“We need to consider our system that we built as sociotechnical systems. The system is more than the sum of its parts. It’s a product of their interactions. We need to focus on improving the performance of the whole, instead of separate parts of the system."

Susanne Kaiser is the author of the upcoming book “Adaptive Systems with Domain-Driven Design, Wardley Mapping, and Team Topologies: Architecture for Flow”. In this episode, Susanne explained how she connected the dots between 3 different methodologies–Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design, and Team Topologies–to design and build adaptive systems for a fast flow of change and why it is important for any organization to have adaptive systems. Susanne went in depth to explain about the Wardley Mapping strategic framework, its five sections, and how they support designing and evolving effective business strategies based on situational awareness and movement following a strategy cycle. She then explained how to translate from a Wardley map into Domain-Driven Design, how DDD helps in applying the Wardley Mapping doctrine principles, before then explaining how Team Topologies helps to create effective team boundaries and optimize team’s cognitive load. Towards the end, Susanne shared from her experience how we can apply this process in our organizations, as well as in legacy systems.

Listen out for:

Career Journey - [00:07:00]
DDD, Wardley Mapping & Team Topologies - [00:09:56]
Adaptive System - [00:15:57]
Wardley Mapping - [00:19:53]
Doctrine Principles - [00:28:09]
Domain-Driven Design and Team Topologies - [00:31:16]
How to Apply in an Organization - [00:38:49]
How to Apply to Legacy - [00:41:30]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:47:04]

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Susanne Kaiser’s Bio
Susanne Kaiser is an independent tech consultant from Hamburg, Germany, supporting organizations with building socio-technical systems. She is passionate about connecting the dots between Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design, and Team Topologies as a holistic approach to design and build adaptive systems for a fast flow of change. Susanne was previously working as a startup CTO and has a background in computer sciences and experience in software development and software architecture since 2002. She is the author of the book “Adaptive Systems with Domain-Driven Design, Wardley Mapping, and Team Topologies: Architecture for Flow” (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Vernon), 2022).

Follow Susanne:

Website – https://www.susannekaiser.net/
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/susannekaiser1/
Twitter – https://www.twitter.com/suksr

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#85 - Agile Recruiting: Hiring in a Complex and Uncertain World - Jens Olberding Apr 18, 2022

Show notes

“Today, employees want more autonomy, e.g. work-life balance and working from home, and at the same time, they want more social inclusion to get as many authentic insights into the company and the new job as possible."

Jens Olberding is the author of “Agile Recruiting” and an expert in agile HR management. In this episode, we opened our conversation discussing the great resignation trend and its underlying reasons. Jens then shared the concept of agile recruiting and explained how it is very much relevant to the latest changes in the current job landscape. He emphasized that recruiting should not only put focus just on the hiring departments’ needs but also equally on the candidates to understand better what they truly want from their career. Jens also shared a few recruiting best practices, such as getting the recruiting teams’ involvements in the recruitment process, building cross-functional teams, and the SuSiBOL interview technique that he shared towards the end to help in assessing candidates’ behaviors and competencies better.

Listen out for:

Career Journey - [00:06:00]
The Great Resignation - [00:07:33]
Agile Recruiting - [00:11:10]
What the Candidate Wants - [00:14:12]
Recruiting Team Involvement - [00:15:55]
Hire for Talent, Train for Skills - [00:18:50]
Cross-Functional Team - [00:20:24]
Assessing Potentials - [00:22:52]
Communication Among Equals - [00:24:23]
Preselection - [00:26:22]
Diversity of Experience - [00:30:51]
SuSiBOL Technique - [00:34:21]
Onboarding - [00:39:14]
Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:42:48]

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Jens Olberding’s Bio
Jens Olberding is an expert in agile HR management and recruiting. He is a qualified organisational psychologist and has a Master’s degree in Human Resource Management. He is also a lecturer for diagnostics and recruitment and teaches methods for competence-based recruiting processes. His focus is on supporting agile transformations and the development of agile HR organisations in medium-sized companies. As a coach for leadership and transformation, he accompanies teams, leaders and organisations on their way to more agility.

Follow Jens:

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jens-olberding-130b618a/
Twitter – @jens_olberding
Website – https://www.jo-agilehr.de/
Website – https://www.laeuft.io/

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#84 - Tech Consulting and Upskilling Others Through Livestreams - Laurențiu Spilcă Apr 11, 2022

Show notes

“The route of becoming a technical leader is helping others up-skill and grow. Once you learn that helping others grow is your objective, then you become a leader."

Laurențiu Spilcă is a development lead and trainer at Endava. He is an author of multiple books and a frequent coding livestreamer on YouTube. In this episode, Laurențiu shared his experience as a developer consultant and provided his view on dealing with the expectation for a consultant or tech lead to know about everything in technology. Laurențiu then shared the importance of soft skills and why it is important for every developer to improve them, in particular when doing code reviews and technical interviews. Laurențiu also shared advice on how to deal with toxic culture when consulting and the importance of not having emotional attachments to the projects. Towards the end, Laurențiu shared about his YouTube channel and coding livestream sessions, along with the reasons he started them. He also gave practical tips on how we can produce and structure our content based on his vast experience publishing books, courses, and livestreams.

Listen out for:

Career Journey - [00:05:59]
Developer Consultant Role - [00:09:06]
Knowing About Everything - [00:12:17]
The Case for Upgrading Tech Stack - [00:17:33]
Importance of Soft Skills - [00:21:58]
Improving Soft Skills - [00:24:40]
Tips on Code Review - [00:29:26]
Outsider Treatment - [00:31:01]
Project Attachment - [00:35:35]
Starting YouTube Channel - [00:37:00]
Coding Livestream - [00:40:24]
Tips for Producing Content - [00:42:35]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:46:13]

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Laurențiu Spilcă’s Bio
Laurentiu Spilca is a dedicated development lead and trainer at Endava, where he leads and consults on multiple projects from various locations in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. Laurentiu believes it’s essential to not only deliver high-quality software but to also share knowledge and help others to up-skill, which has driven him to design and teach courses related to Java technologies and deliver presentations and workshops. He is the author of Spring Security in Action and Spring Quickly.

Follow Laurențiu:

Youtube – https://www.youtube.com/c/LaurentiuSpilca
Website – https://laurspilca.com/
Twitter – @laurspilca
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren%C5%A3iu-spilc%C4%83-01a931107/

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#83 - Effective Remote Work - James Stanier Apr 04, 2022

Show notes

“Treating everyone as remote is to keep everyone in mind as having the same level, same equality, the same access to information in communication exchanges between people."

James Stanier is the author of “Effective Remote Work” and Director of Engineering at Shopify. In this episode, James shared insights from his latest book and began by sharing why remote work is here to stay and the basic setup for remote work. He then talked about the importance of managing our time and energy and establishing team norms for successful remote work. James then explained about the concept of treating everyone as remote, which led to the discussion about producing more artifacts and balancing between synchronous and asynchronous working style. We also extended the discussion on how one can become a more effective manager in the remote setup, including how to manage up and allocating time for team bonding and fun activities. Towards the end, James shared how we can self-assess our remote working practices by using the 12 questions in his book, and how remote is the path to equality and can become a great leveler for everyone.

Listen out for:

Writing “Effective Remote Work” - [00:06:53]
Remote is Here to Stay - [00:08:36]
Basic Remote Setup - [00:11:45]
Managing Yourself - [00:14:38]
Effects of Being Unobserved - [00:17:19]
Treat Everyone as Remote - [00:19:59]
Producing More Artifacts - [00:22:13]
Types of Artifacts - [00:25:18]
Sync vs Async - [00:30:01]
Effective Remote Manager - [00:36:55]
Managing Up - [00:39:43]
Allocating Fun Time - [00:42:27]
Remote Work Self-Assessment - [00:44:44]
Remote: The Great Leveler - [00:47:36]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:53:29]

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James Stanier’s Bio
James Stanier is Director of Engineering at Shopify, a fully remote technology company. His latest book, Effective Remote Work, is being published by The Pragmatic Bookshelf in April 2022. His previous book, Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager, was published in 2020.

Follow James:

Website – https://theengineeringmanager.com
Twitter – @jstanier
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jstanier/

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#82 - Engineering Leadership Lessons From Scaling Up Bukalapak - Mohammed Alabsi Mar 28, 2022

Show notes

“There’s a substantial difference between building software and then building software for production and then building software for scale."

Mohammed Alabsi is a seasoned technology leader, an angel investor, and a venture fellow at Insignia Ventures. Mohammed worked at Amazon for 10 years, before moving to Southeast Asia and helped scale up Bukalapak towards its IPO. In this episode, Mohammed started by sharing his lessons learned from his time at Amazon, working on EC2, advertising business, and B2B e-commerce. Mohammed then shared his journey at Bukalapak and described the challenges that he had to tackle during the scale-up stage, such as setting up engineering processes and governance, growing high-performing engineering teams rapidly, and building alignment across those multiple teams. He also gave great tips for leaders on the importance of managing up and keeping the leadership and stakeholders in the loop. Towards the end, Mohammed shared about his current role as a tech investor and advisor and gave some great advice on common mistakes startup should avoid, as well as advice for tech leaders in the early stage startups.

Listen out for:

Career Journey - [00:05:31]
Lessons from Amazon and AWS - [00:08:42]
Common Scale-up Challenges - [00:11:12]
Growing the Team Fast - [00:14:58]
Process and Governance - [00:18:37]
Teams and Alignment - [00:23:26]
Managing Up - [00:25:46]
Tech Investing and Advisory - [00:28:41]
Startup Mistakes to Avoid - [00:30:03]
Advice for Leaders - [00:33:01]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:33:59]

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Mohammed Alabsi’s Bio
Mohammed Alabsi is a seasoned technology leader with experience in the US, Asia and the Middle East. Mohammed’s career began with Maktoob.com where he helped build two businesses that were acquired by Yahoo! and Amazon. During his 10 years tenure at Amazon, Mohammed built AWS services powering the infrastructure of millions of tech companies worldwide. He was also a founding member of two of Amazon’s major businesses, in Advertising and Amazon B2B e-commerce. Inspired by Southeast Asia’s pace of technology innovation, he joined Bukalapak as an SVP of engineering. At Bukalapak he led a team of 800 technical staff, launched numerous products, and helped gear the business towards IPO. Mohammed is active in the startup scene, advising and investing in startups across ASEAN and the US. He is also a venture fellow at Insignia Ventures.

Follow Mohammed:

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/alabsi/

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#81 - Architecture Is Context—Making the Right Architecture Decisions - Eltjo Poort Mar 21, 2022

Show notes

“Architecture is context. You can only make the right trade-offs between alternatives if you know the context drivers."

Eltjo Poort is the architecture practice lead at CGI Netherlands with over 30 years of experience in the software industry. In this episode, Eltjo started by explaining the importance of architecture context and business drivers that can help an architect understand the different trade-offs and options in order to make the right architecture decisions. Eltjo shared the architect’s main responsibilities and how architects should avoid writing big and long architecture documents by understanding the different goals of an architecture document. Eltjo also shared his great insights on how we should deal with technical debt, “move slow and fix things”, and put a more balanced effort towards working on enablers in order to maintain sustainable pace in delivering great software. Towards the end, Eltjo shared a few anti-patterns that architects should avoid based on his article “Waterfall Wasteland and Agile Outback”.

Listen out for:

Career Journey - [00:05:40]
Architecture is Context - [00:11:10]
Understanding Architectural Trade-offs - [00:13:51]
Understanding the Business Drivers - [00:17:59]
Incorrect Architecture Decisions - [00:20:41]
Architect’s Responsibility - [00:23:45]
Architecture Documentation Goals - [00:26:43]
Dealing with Technical Debt - [00:32:30]
Enablers - [00:36:38]
Waterfall Wasteland and Agile Outback - [00:40:26]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:44:46]

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Eltjo Poort’s Bio
Eltjo R. Poort leads the architecture practice at CGI in The Netherlands. In his 30-year career in the software industry, he has fulfilled many engineering and project management roles. In the 1990s, he oversaw the implementation of the first SMS text messaging systems in the United States. In the last decade, he produced various publications on improving architecting practices, including his PhD thesis in 2012. Eltjo is best known for his work on Risk- and Cost-Driven Architecture, a set of principles and practices for agile architecting, for which he received the Linda Northrop Software Architecture Award in 2016. His digital architecture blog can be found at eltjopoort.nl. Eltjo is also a member of IFIP Working Group 2.11 on Software Architecture. In his spare time, Eltjo plays the violin in Symfonieorkest Nijmegen.

Follow Eltjo:

Website – https://eltjopoort.nl/
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/eltjopoort/
Twitter – @eltjopoort

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