Shizen

Shizen (自然) Naturalness. An absence of pretense or artificiality, full creative intent unforced. Ironically, the spontaneous nature of the Japanese garden that the viewer perceives is not accidental. This is a reminder that design is not an accident, even when we are trying to create a natural-feeling environment. It is not a raw nature as such but one with more purpose and intention.

🐕‍🦺 Leadership

Levels of Technical Leadership

This article describes why and how a tech company can offer a career path to its engineering technical leaders, that is, different tracks for “deep ICs” versus “broad ICs”.

Claire Donald, VP of engineering, on being a woman in tech

Claire Donald, VP of engineering, tells us about being a woman in the still-very-male world of tech and the future of work.

Bottleneck #01: Tech Debt

This first post in a series studies common technical debt bottlenecks by companies entering growth. The authors look at causes of tech debt bottlenecks, various types of debt, signs you are approaching this bottleneck, and strategies to get out of it, including setting a quality bar, damage limitation to the business, collaboration with product, and more.

Great Expectations: Making Hybrid Work Work

From when to go to the office to why work in the first place, employees have a new “worth it” equation. And there’s no going back. Microsoft’s article on the hybrid work setup.

Haphazard Organization Design Is Holding Companies Back From Growth

A great call to action from one of the great synthesizers of our business. Top ideas in this include: over hiring, being ‘top of the license’, and a cool Organisation Design Maturity Model.

💻 Tech

How to make software architecture trade-off decisions

How do you come up with the best software solution for a problem and pitch that choice to both your technical and non-technical peers in your organization? And what are some common pitfalls in comparing your options?

Optimize Development Cold Start

Development Cold Start saps your software team’s productivity, morale, and can ruin availability, security, and quality.

The Future of Micro-Frontends

A Principal Architect at AWS talks about his view of the state and future of micro-frontends.

Cascading failures in large-scale distributed systems

Examples, causes, and common pitfalls sprinkled with an AWS incident as a case study.

Building robust distributed systems

Distributed systems give us tremendous scalability, but we need to build them the right way to reap the full benefits of this complicated architecture.

Awesome list of Important Podcasts for software engineers

Not much to add: a list of podcasts that are helpful for software engineers/programmers.

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