Tech Lead Journal
Episodes
#158 - Sustainable Engineering Lessons From Scaling Up Wise - Balazs Barna
01 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“A team has to be able to go fast if they have to. But they should always choose to go at a steady pace, most of the time. In the long run, what we ...
[Best of 2023] #122 - Essential Things Every Software Engineer Should Know - Kevlin Henney
01 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“In a world that runs on software, when we develop and deploy software, we are part of a larger system where our failures are no longer about us, th...
[Best of 2023] #120 - Software Architecture: From Fundamentals to the Hard Parts - Neal Ford
01 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“Everything in software architecture is a trade-off, and the why is more important than how." Today's clip is from Tech Lead Journal episod...
#157 - Platform Strategy: Innovation Through Harmonization - Gregor Hohpe
17 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Platforms harmonize and standardize without restricting. By standardizing, they actually enable and allow people to do more things." Gregor Ho...
#156 - Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow - Dominica DeGrandis
27 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“The five thieves of time are: too much work in progress, conflicting priorities, unplanned work, unknown dependencies, and neglected work." Do...
#155 - Build What Matters With Vision-Led Product Management - Ben Foster
20 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Product driven means you understand what your customers’ problems are, but you don’t let yourself get held back by what your customers are sayi...
#154 - Scale a Fast and Resilient Company With Lean - Catherine Chabiron & Fabrice Bernhard
13 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Lean is not about how we organize work, but how we think about it. It’s not a production system; it’s an education system." Catherine Chab...
#153 - Architecture Modernization: Socio-Technical Alignment of Software, Strategy, and Structure - Nick Tune
30 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Architecture touches on the software, the business, and the team organization. Modernization updates something that has some outdated thinking, e.g...
#152 - Craft Your Code with Software Craftsmanship - Srihari Sridharan
16 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“We need to change our ways of working to give importance to the work quality that we deliver, ensure we keep raising our bar, and pass it on to the...
#151 - Build Your Model for Leadership and Leading Change - Marsha Acker
09 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Leading change is high stakes, but we don’t spend a great deal of time focusing on conversation and creating space to engage in real conversation...
#150 - How to Think Like a CTO - Alan Williamson
02 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“A CTO gives the business the technology it needs to drive success by delivering a roadmap to grow and scale at a level and speed where technology n...
#149 - Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams - Heidi Helfand
18 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“A lot of the traditional wisdom said the best teams are the ones that stay stable or the same; you need long-lived stable teams. The fact is, team ...
#148 - Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) Essentials - Jan Molak & John Ferguson Smart
11 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“BDD is about helping you collaborate with the different parties involved in software delivery to understand what’s actually required of your syst...
#147 - Collaborative Software Design: How to Facilitate Domain Modeling Decisions - Evelyn Van Kelle & Gien Verschatse
04 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Collaborative modeling is getting the relevant people into a room to solve a problem or get on the same page about what it is you’re solving and ...
#146 - Wrong Fit, Right Fit: Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever - Andre Martin
28 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Do not start a job search by looking for jobs. Start a job search by understanding at a deeper level who you are, what you value, how you like to w...
#145 - Becoming a Happy Engineer Through Lifestyle Engineering - Zachary White
21 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Lifestyle engineering is about taking the idea we have within us to create a different reality in our own lives. It’s amazing what’s possible w...
#144 - Better Value Sooner Safer Happier - Jonathan Smart & Simon Rohrer
14 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“The goal is not Agile. The goal is not DevOps. The goal is not Cloud. The goal is value, time to value, safety, happiness, and quality." Jonat...
#143 - How to Think Like a Software Engineering Manager - Akanksha Gupta
31 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Think about delegation as more of a coaching mindset instead of the doer mentality. It’s not about looking at the immediate task at hand, it’s ...
#142 - The Power of Leadership Principles and Positive Leadership - Michael Foss
24 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“To build trust, you need to do the right thing, do the best you can, and show people you care. And when you do that, it builds commitment. Trust an...
#141 - Auditing with Agility: Stop Fearing Your Auditors - Clarissa Lucas
17 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“You should never do something just because the auditors want you to do it. They should be able to explain the risk and controls in accordance with ...
#140 - Tech Founding Lessons from an Incorrigible Entrepreneur - Jothy Rosenberg
10 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“It’s so important to start with a problem and make sure you understand it is a big market. Many tech founding teams end up building a technology ...
#139 - A Developer's Guide to Effective Software Testing - Mauricio Aniche
03 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“An effective developer is an effective software tester. As a developer, it’s your responsibility to make sure what you do works. And automated te...
#138 - Building Application Security Program - Derek Fisher
26 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Building an application security program is about ensuring security is built into the software development lifecycle and how to respond to vulnerab...
#137 - Lean DevOps: A Practical Guide to On-Demand Delivery - Robert Benefield
19 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“It’s not about the tools or processes. Most important is you understand the target outcomes for your customers and establish the right level of s...
#136 - Privacy Engineering: How to Build for Data Privacy - Nishant Bhajaria
05 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Privacy is about handling data in a way that builds for both compliance and trust, maturity and transparency." Nishant Bhajaria is cybersecuri...
#135 - Microservice Reflection & Scaling Complex Adaptive System - James Lewis
29 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Spend some time looking at the system in which you work. Understand how the work is working. Understand how flow is for your organization. And then...
#134 - A Developer-Centric Approach to Measuring and Improving Productivity - Margaret-Anne Storey & Abi Noda
22 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“The three core dimensions of developer experience are feedback loops, cognitive load, and flow state." Margaret-Anne (Peggy) Storey and Abi No...
#133 - Software Requirements Essentials - Karl Wiegers
15 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“The goal of requirements development is clear and effective communication. Thus, it has to be done in an incremental and iterative fashion." K...
#132 - Rock the Tech Stage With Public Speaking and Killer Demo - Oscar Santolalla
08 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Speak about topics you are passionate about, because if you are passionate about something, you can easily find the story and the motivation that w...
#131 - Data Essentials in Software Architecture - Pramod Sadalage
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“The notion of transaction, consistency, and ACID compliance are many times tech imposed. It should be the business that makes the decision. We as t...
#130 - Remote Work Insights & Leading Engineers as a Non-Engineer - Sarah Milstein
24 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Understand the stage of your company and the kind of risks you face at that stage, make decisions that are appropriate, and remind other people abo...
#129 - GIST Framework for Building High-Value, High-Impact Products - Itamar Gilad
17 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“The difference of why some companies are so much more successful at producing high value, high-impact products than others comes to 4 areas of GIST...
#128 - Threshold Leadership: Leading in the Age of AI - Nick Chatrath
10 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“The core of threshold leadership is a set of four pathways of cultivating stillness, embodying intelligence, thinking independently, and maturing c...
#127 - Building Successful Products With Game Thinking - Amy Jo Kim
03 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“3 core ideas in game thinking: super fan funnel to find the right people, loop design to create the experience people want to stick around for, and...
#126 - Elevating Leadership Through Vertical Development - Ryan Gottfredson
27 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“The vertical altitude of the organization leaders sets the ceiling for how effective the organization can be." Ryan Gottfredson is a leadershi...
#125 - Patterns for API Design - Daniel Luebke
20 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“A good API doesn’t expose the internal data models or internal logic too much. And the more your clients are not under your control, the less you...
#124 - The Value Flywheel Effect - David Anderson
13 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“The business technology divide was apparent in many companies. The idea of the value flywheel effect is to join the business and technology goals a...
#123 - The Empathetic Workplace: How to Handle Workplace Trauma - Katharine Manning
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. What people want in these traumatic moments is somebody to listen to and a...
#122 - Essential Things Every Software Engineer Should Know - Kevlin Henney
27 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“In a world that runs on software, when we develop and deploy software, we are part of a larger system where our failures are no longer about us, th...
#121 - Developing Creative Identity at Work & Personal Life - Oana Velcu-Laitinen
20 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Creativity at work is a type of thinking and a process of developing ourselves and our ability to create and bring novelty to our professional life...
#120 - Software Architecture: From Fundamentals to the Hard Parts - Neal Ford
13 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Everything in software architecture is a trade-off, and the why is more important than how." Neal Ford is a Director and software architect at Thou...
#119 - Becoming a Professional Agile Leader - Ron Eringa
06 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“If you have self-organizing teams, your power as a leader is determined by your ability to enable others to grow and take responsibility." Ron Erin...
#118 - Lead Without Blame: Building Resilient Learning Teams - Diana Larsen
30 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“When blame is our focus rather than understanding what happened, people spend as much or more energy avoiding the blame and less time to be product...
#117 - How to Establish SRE Foundations From Scratch - Vladyslav Ukis
23 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“The strength of SRE is in the alignment of operational concerns between the product management, product development, and product operations." Dr. V...
#116 - Human Powered Teams With Emotional Intelligence - Trenton Moss
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Emotional intelligence is about knowing yourself, empathizing with other people, and always defining a win-win outcome in everything you do." Trent...
[Best of 2022] #94 - Engineering Manager Essentials - Patrick Kua
02 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“An engineering manager should make sure that the team has a good balance of delivering things that the business needs with enough capacity to do it...
[Best of 2022] #76 - Learning Domain-Driven Design - Vladik Khononov
26 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Interactions with domain experts play a key role in implementing software. You have to make sure that you understand the problem you’re solving. ...
[Best of 2022] #90 - Clean Craftsmanship - Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“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...
[Best of 2022] #102 - Building Inspired & Empowered Product Teams - Marty Cagan
12 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Instead of being given a roadmap of features, an empowered team is given a problem to solve and they get to figure out the best way to solve that prob...
[Best of 2022] #100 - Modern Software Engineering - Dave Farley
05 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Engineering discipline is the most effective, efficient way of doing high-quality work. If our software development practices do not allow us to bu...
#115 - Senior Engineering Leadership & Scaling Engineering Teams - Manoj Awasthi
28 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Every organization has a mission, a vision, and a set of values. As a leader, your number one task is to live those values and talk about them at e...
#114 - A Radical Enterprise & Radical Collaboration - Matt K. Parker
21 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Intrinsic motivation is a great predictor of success. When people are doing things they feel intrinsically motivated to do, they tend to be much mo...
#113 - Architecture Decision Record (ADR) - Michael Keeling
14 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“An ADR is a simple text file describing the context, the decision, and the consequences of a single architectural decision stored in the version co...
#112 - Developer Productivity and Experience - Abi Noda
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Developer experience is an approach to thinking about engineering excellence and maximizing engineering performance by increasing the capacity and ...
#111 - Teach the Geek to Speak: Public Speaking for Technical Professionals - Neil Thompson
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“The people who are the communicators are the ones visible within companies. Just being technically proficient is not enough. You have to be an advo...
#110 - Elastic Leadership: Growing Self-Organizing Teams - Roy Osherove
24 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“As a team leader, you will become more successful and valuable if you are no longer a bottleneck for the people who are working with you and under ...
#109 - A Strengths-Based Approach to Leadership - Brandon Miller
17 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“The most responsible thing a human can do, either personally for their own development or the development of others, is play to a person’s streng...
#108 - Building the Future of Cloud Engineering With Pulumi - Joe Duffy
10 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Companies that are successful in getting the most out of the cloud embrace the fact that distributed application architecture is a first class appl...
#107 - Data Mesh: Delivering Data-Driven Value at Scale - Zhamak Dehghani
03 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“If you want to unlock the value of your data by generating data-driven values, and you want to do it reliably and resiliently at scale, then you ne...
#106 - Company-wide Agility With BOSSA Nova - Jutta Eckstein
26 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“There’s no leading without following. We are only a leader because somebody is following us." Jutta Eckstein is a coach, consultant, and trainer ...
#105 - Coaching for Technical Leaders - Bob Galen
19 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“If you want to become a better and more effective leader, then one of your core skills should be coaching skills." Bob Galen is the President &...
#104 - Growing Through Experimentation - Lisi Hocke
12 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“The most important part about building an experiment-driven culture is to make it safe to fail and to fail in good ways." Lisi Hocke is an active f...
#103 - Software Development Pearls - Karl Wiegers
05 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“A way to boost productivity is to create high-quality software from the outset, so that teams can spend less time on rework, both during developmen...
#102 - Building Inspired & Empowered Product Teams - Marty Cagan
29 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Instead of being given a roadmap of features, an empowered team is given a problem to solve and they get to figure out the best way to solve that p...
#101 - My Engineering Leadership Story & 100 Episodes Reflection - Henry Suryawirawan
22 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“As a servant leader, your number one job is to serve the people around you. You succeed together with your people, and that’s why serving them fi...
#100 - Modern Software Engineering - Dave Farley
08 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
🎙️ CELEBRATE the 100th EPISODE by submitting your story/message at techleadjournal.dev/celebrate-100 🎉 “Engineering discipline is the most ...
#99 - Better Software With Acceptance Test-Driven Development - Kenneth Pugh
01 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
🎙️ CELEBRATE the 100th EPISODE by submitting your story/message at techleadjournal.dev/celebrate-100 🎉 “Acceptance test is any test that a ...
#98 - Professional Agile Leadership With Empiricism, Catalytic Leadership, and Self-Management for Agility - Kurt Bittner
25 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Empiricism is at the heart of agility. The fundamental foundation of agility starts with some assertion about value. Every sprint or iteration is r...
#97 - Personal Kanban & Collaboration Equation - Jim Benson
18 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“A highly functional team defines the right environment and has what they need to be the best professionals they can be. And that always includes ag...
#96 - Practical Guide to Implementing SRE and SLOs - Alex Hidalgo
11 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Reliability is the most important thing. Your users define your reliability, so make sure you’re measuring the right thing. And 100% is out of th...
#95 - Top Career Lessons from an Engineering Career Coach - Jeff Perry
04 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“You are your greatest asset in your career and in your life. Invest in you personally in all areas of life in order to live your best life." Jeff P...
#94 - Engineering Manager Essentials - Patrick Kua
27 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“An engineering manager should make sure that the team has a good balance of delivering things that the business needs with enough capacity to do it...
#93 - Maximum Value Maximum Speed Software - Dave Thomas
20 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“We want to write as little software as possible, and we want it to have as much value as possible. If you actually focus on that, it means you have...
#92 - Agile and Holistic Testing - Janet Gregory & Lisa Crispin
13 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Testing is an activity that happens throughout. It is not a phase that happens at the end. Start thinking about the risks at the very beginning, an...
#91 - Lean Software Development Principles and Mindset - Mary & Tom Poppendieck
06 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
"Pull, don’t push. Don’t tell people what to do. Tell them what results you want and let them figure out how best to achieve the outcome that’s ...
#90 - Clean Craftsmanship - Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)
30 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“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...
#89 - Code That Fits in Your Head - Mark Seemann
23 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“The goal of software is often to sustain an organization. An organization invests in software in order to achieve some goal and hopefully to sustai...
#88 - Observability Engineering - Liz Fong-Jones
16 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Observability is a technique for ensuring that you can understand novel problems in your system. Can you understand what’s happening in your syst...
#87 - Learning to Program With Exercism and Building Employee Culture With Kaido - Jeremy Walker
09 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“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 yo...
#86 - Adaptive Systems with Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design, and Team Topologies - Susanne Kaiser
02 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“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 int...
#85 - Agile Recruiting: Hiring in a Complex and Uncertain World - Jens Olberding
18 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“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 ...
#84 - Tech Consulting and Upskilling Others Through Livestreams - Laurențiu Spilcă
11 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“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 b...
#83 - Effective Remote Work - James Stanier
04 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Treating everyone as remote is to keep everyone in mind as having the same level, same equality, the same access to information in communication ex...
#82 - Engineering Leadership Lessons From Scaling Up Bukalapak - Mohammed Alabsi
28 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“There’s a substantial difference between building software and then building software for production and then building software for scale." Moham...
#81 - Architecture Is Context—Making the Right Architecture Decisions - Eltjo Poort
21 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Architecture is context. You can only make the right trade-offs between alternatives if you know the context drivers." Eltjo Poort is the architect...
#80 - Personal Agility System - Peter Stevens and Maria Matarelli
14 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Focus on what really matters. If everything matters, then nothing matters. Make sure that what you do is aligned with what really matters." Peter S...
#79 - Domain-Driven Design With Functional Programming - Scott Wlaschin
07 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“It is good to improve your processes to make them faster and more efficient. But sometimes what’s even more important is doing the right thing in...
#78 - Alignment: Overcoming Internal Sabotage and Digital Product Failure - Jonathon Hensley
28 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Oftentimes it’s not about what’s being said. It’s the fact that there’s not a shared understanding of what’s being said. It’s important...
#77 - Transformational Leadership: A Guide for the Soulful and Practical Leaders - Jardena London
21 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“We want to create organizations that can surprise us and do things beyond what we’ve designed them to do, rather than a machine, which only opera...
#76 - Learning Domain-Driven Design - Vladik Khononov
14 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Interactions with domain experts play a key role in implementing software. You have to make sure that you understand the problem you’re solving. ...
#75 - Domain Storytelling: Building Domain-Driven Software Collaboratively - Stefan Hofer
07 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“It’s great if developers have understanding about the domain, because then they can propose better solutions, that’s not necessarily the same s...
#74 - Rapid Web Apps Development With Anvil & Importance of Product Documentation - Meredydd Luff
31 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Documentation is content marketing. If your docs don’t summarize what your product is actually about, you’re going to have a rough time getting...
#73 - Continuous Architecture (Part 3) - Security and Resilience - Eoin Woods
24 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Because we ship stuff now almost immediately into public facing clients, almost as soon as we’re writing a line of code, we need to be thinking a...
#72 - Managing SRE Toils Using AIOps and NoOps - Amrith Raj
17 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“It is important to eliminate toil. If you don’t eliminate toil, you won’t have time to fix problems strategically, because strategic initiative...
#71 - Strategic Monoliths and Microservices - Vaughn Vernon
10 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Strategy is what earns. Use the strategic and innovative drivers to help us determine what our architecture needs to be. Architecture has to have a...
#70 - Continuous Architecture (Part 2) - Principles, Scalability, and Performance - Pierre Pureur
27 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“Delay design decisions until it’s necessary. Architecture is an art, not a science. Don’t architect for things you don’t know. Your design de...
#69 - The Relevance of Project Management in Tech Today - Jana Axline
20 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“Successful project managers have a bias for action. They’re out there pushing the project forward all the time and doing all the things that need...
#68 - 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report - Nathen Harvey
13 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“Many organizations think in order to be safe, they have to be slow. But the data shows us that the best performers are getting both. And in fact, a...
#67 - Continuous Architecture (Part 1) - Principles and Essential Activities - Murat Erder
06 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“As an architect, your main focus is to influence what’s running in production and to make sure you make the right decisions, so that you have a s...
#66 - Time and Temporal Modeling in Event Sourcing - Tomasz Jaskula
29 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“Time is important for business. We have to model it explicitly. Temporal modeling means that we use time-based artifacts as first modeling citizens...