Tech Lead Journal

“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 to be done to make the project successful." Jana Axline is the founder and Managing Director of Project Genetics, with over 20 years of experience in leadership, project, and portfolio management. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about the important role of project management. Jana explained how project management is still much relevant in the current era of agile and “project to product” movement within the tech industry. She outlined the important skill set required to become an effective project manager, how a project manager can earn much respect from the team, and pointed out some of the common project management anti-patterns we should avoid. She also gave her practical advice on how to do effective status report and project escalation. Towards the end, Jana gave her insightful perspectives based on her vast experience of why IT projects tend to have a high failure rate. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:06:05] Relevance of Project Management - [00:07:30] Project to Product Movement - [00:12:26] Skills of an Effective Project Manager - [00:14:41] Purpose vs Checklist - [00:18:23] Leaders vs Coordinator - [00:19:29] Earning the Respect - [00:21:20] Project Management Anti-Patterns - [00:23:26] Status Report - [00:26:54] Escalation - [00:29:36] Project Management Tools - [00:32:32] Tips for Project Management Career - [00:35:08] Tech Projects Failure - [00:37:59] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:40:31] _____ Jana Axline’s Bio Jana Axline is the founder and the Managing Director of Project Genetics. A focused leader and project manager, her expertise stems from more than 20 years of experience in leadership and almost ten years in project and portfolio management in many industries such as Health Insurance, Healthcare, Financial Services, Mining, Retail, Government, FMCG and Supply Chain Management. Jana was also the past president of the Project Management Institute Mile High Chapter. She speaks internationally on project management, employee engagement and leadership. She is an active PMP, ACP, Scrum Master, and Scaled Agilist and holds an MBA in Finance from the University of Colorado. Follow Jana: LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/janaaxline/ Blog – http://www.janaaxline.com/ Project Genetics – https://projectgenetics.com/ Instagram – @projectgenetics Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/69.

“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, as speed increases, so too does stability." Nathen Harvey is the co-author of 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report and a Developer Advocate at Google. In this episode, we discussed in-depth the latest release of the State of DevOps Report. Nathen started by describing what the report is all about, how it got started, and explained the five key metrics suggested by the report to measure the software delivery and operational performance. Nathen then explained how the report categorizes different performers based on their performance against the key metrics and how the elite performers outperform the others in terms of speed, stability, and reliability. Next, we dived into several new key findings that came out of the 2021 report that relate to documentation, secure software supply chain, and burnout. Towards the end, Nathen gave great tips on how we can use the findings from the reports to get started and improve our software delivery and operational performance, that ultimately will improve our organizational performance. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:28] State of DevOps Report - [00:09:32] The Five Key Metrics - [00:13:55] Speed, Safety, and Reliability - [00:19:58] Performers Categories - [00:23:26] 2021 New Key Findings - [00:28:01] New Finding: Documentation - [00:30:44] New Finding: Secure Software Supply Chain - [00:34:58] New Finding: Burnout - [00:37:22] How to Start Improving - [00:39:36] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:43:55] _____ Nathen Harvey’s Bio Nathen Harvey, Developer Relations Engineer at Google, has built a career on helping teams realize their potential while aligning technology to business outcomes. Nathen has had the privilege of working with some of the best teams and open source communities, helping them apply the principles and practices of DevOps and SRE. He is part of the Google Cloud DORA research team and a co-author of the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report. Nathen was an editor for 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know, published by O’Reilly in 2020. Follow Nathen: Twitter – @nathenharvey LinkedIn – https://linkedin.com/in/nathen Github – https://github.com/nathenharvey Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/68.

“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 sustainable product." Murat Erder is the co-author of “Continuous Architecture in Practice” and the CTO of People and Procurement at Deutsche Bank. In this first of a three-part series of “Continuous Architecture” episodes, Murat started by explaining what software architecture is and then explained in-depth the six principles of continuous architecture mindset. Murat continued by outlining the four essential activities of architecture that involve architectural decisions, technical debt, quality attributes, and feedback loops. Towards the end, we discussed the importance of data as an architectural concern. We touched on a few recent key data technology trends that impact and drive software architecture, including the importance of the data model as a prerequisite for successful software architecture. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:28] Software Architecture - [00:09:12] Six Principles of Continuous Architecture - [00:12:42] Focus on Quality Attributes - [00:17:56] Essential Activities - [00:19:16] Architectural Decisions - [00:21:55] Understand Technical Debt - [00:24:53] Data as an Architectural Concern - [00:29:33] Data Technology Trends - [00:32:10] Importance of Data Model - [00:37:20] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:39:46] _____ Murat Erder’s Bio Murat Erder is the CTO for People and Procurement at Deutsche Bank. His 25+ years of experience in the software industry range from software vendors, management consultancies, and large international banks, in which he worked as a developer, software architect, and management consultant. Murat’s main area of expertise is in data, integration, and architecture/CTO. Murat is the co-author of two books on software architecture, “Continuous Architecture: Sustainable Architecture in an Agile and Cloud-Centric World” and “Continuous Architecture in Practice: Software Architecture in the Age of Agility and DevOps”, and he has presented on this topic in several conferences, include SEI Saturn, O’Reilly Software Architecture and GOTO London. Follow Murat: LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/murat-erder-62bb98 Twitter – @muraterder Website – https://continuousarchitecture.com/ Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/67.

“Time is important for business. We have to model it explicitly. Temporal modeling means that we use time-based artifacts as first modeling citizens." Tomasz Jaskula is the CTO and co-founder of Luteceo and an experienced software developer and architect. In this episode, we started off discussing how Domain-Driven Design (DDD) influenced Tomasz’s view on software development approach and its relation with functional programming. Tomasz then explained in depth about the time concept in business applications and temporal modeling, in particular, bi-temporal modeling. He mentioned the different concepts of time in temporal modeling, explaining them using an example for easier illustration. We then extended our discussion further to Event Sourcing, understanding the key concept, its relation to temporal modeling, when we should decide to use Event Sourcing in our application, and some available tools that can help us implement Event Sourcing. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:04:58] DDD and Bounded Context - [00:08:56] DDD and Functional Programming - [00:13:24] Temporal Modeling - [00:14:47] 3 Different Types of Time - [00:21:13] Event Sourcing - [00:25:42] When to Use Event Sourcing - [00:28:13] Event Sourcing Tools - [00:34:02] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:36:10] _____ Tomasz’s Bio Tomasz Jaskuła is CTO and co-founder of Luteceo, a software consulting company in Paris. Tomasz has more than 20 years of professional experience as a developer and software architect, and worked for many companies in the e-commerce, industry, insurance, and financial fields. He has mainly focused on creating software that delivers true business value, aligns with strategic business initiatives, and provides solutions with clearly identifiable competitive advantages. Tomasz is also a main contributor to the OSS project XOOM for the .NET platform. In his free time, Tomasz perfects his guitar playing and spends time with his family. He recently wrote a book with Vaughn Vernon titled “Strategic Monoliths and Microservices” published by Addison-Wesley. Follow Tomasz: LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasz-jaskula-16b2823/ Twitter – @tjaskula Luteceo – http://luteceo.com Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/66.

“The best leaders are those that get things done through other people." Nick Horney is the author of “VUCA Masters” and founder of Agility Consulting. In this episode, Nick shared his innovations in leadership agility that include AGILE Model® and Leadership Agility Fitness, which are the cornerstones for becoming inspiring leaders in the current VUCA world, i.e. the VUCA Masters. Nick also shared how we can extend his leadership agility concepts to improve organizational behavior, culture, and mindset in order to reach organizational agility. Towards the end, Nick shared some inspiring leadership lessons from his 23 years of experience serving the US Navy Special Operations, describing the true characteristic and hallmark of the best leaders. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:48] AGILE Model® - [00:08:04] VUCA - [00:13:20] Leadership Agility Fitness - [00:19:46] Leadership Self-Agility Assessment - [00:24:14] VUCA Masters - [00:29:30] Leadership Agility and Agile - [00:32:10] Organizational Behavior - [00:34:26] Leadership Lessons From the Military - [00:40:35] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:43:55] _____ Nick Horney’s Bio Dr. Nicholas Horney founded Agility Consulting in 2001 and has been recognized for innovations in organizational and leadership agility, including The AGILE Model®, VUCA Masters™, Leadership Agility Fitness™, After Action Agility™ and Talent Portfolio Agility™. His coaching, leadership agility and organizational agility management consulting experience spans over 30 years and includes the start-up and management of the Coopers & Lybrand (now Price Waterhouse Coopers) Change Management Practice. Representative clients include Turner Broadcasting, Coca-Cola, Navy SEALs, Lenovo, CIA, ARAMARK, and REI. Dr. Horney has written four books. The most recent is VUCA Masters: Developing Leadership Agility Fitness for the New World of Work (2021). Nick retired from the U.S. Navy (Special Operations) at the rank of Captain and has applied that experience to his work with high performance team agility. He serves as a coach for The Honor Foundation focusing on the successful transition of Navy SEALs to the business world. Follow Nick: LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickhorney Website – https://agilityconsulting.com/ VUCA Masters Academy – http://vucamasters.com/ Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/65.

“API design centers on effective communication, not just between developers, but also communication that combines product thinking, business, and technology all in one." James Higginbotham is the author of “Principles of Web API Design” and an executive API consultant. In this episode, James explained why it is extremely important to design APIs properly and shared the five key important principles of API design taken from his book. James also recommended the API Design-First approach–a rapid & lightweight outcome-based API design process–to design and deliver APIs successfully, including the ADDR process and establishing API boundaries (in relation to DDD). Towards the end, James shared some recommendation for API testing strategies and also some anti-patterns that we should avoid. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:00] Principles of Web API Design Book - [00:06:46] Importance of Designing API Properly - [00:08:17] Principle 1: API Should Never be Designed in Isolation - [00:13:13] Principle 2: Outcome-Based Focus - [00:15:10] Principle 3: Design Elements That Matches the Needs - [00:17:44] Principle 4: API Documentation as UI for Developers - [00:22:53] Principle 5: APIs are Forever - [00:27:52] API Design First Approach - [00:31:43] ADDR Process - [00:34:43] API Boundaries and DDD - [00:38:56] Testing APIs - [00:43:51] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:47:44] _____ James Higginbotham’s Bio James Higginbotham is a software developer and architect with over 25 years of experience in developing and deploying apps and APIs. He guides enterprises through their digital transformation journey, ensuring alignment between business and technology through product-based thinking to deliver a great customer experience. James engages with teams and organizations to help them align their business, product, and technology strategies into a more composable and modular enterprise platform. James also delivers workshops that help cross-functional teams to apply an API design-first approach using his ADDR process. His work experience includes banking, commercial insurance, hospitality, and the airline industry where he helped a startup airline off the ground – literally. Follow James: LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameshigginbotham Twitter – @launchany LaunchAny – https://launchany.com/ API Developer Weekly newsletter – https://apideveloperweekly.com/ Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/64.

“If you’re a generalist, and if you’re good at multiple things, then you have a lot of options. You have a lot of career paths to choose from." Deepu K Sasidharan is a polyglot developer and a Senior Developer Advocate for DevOps at Okta. In this episode, Deepu shared why he consciously becomes a polyglot and generalist developer. He emphasized the importance of knowing more than one thing in the current rapidly changing tech industry. He gave practical tips for new engineers to start out and shared his technique to learn new stuffs, including languages, by building personal indexes. We then discussed the current interview practices trend and why he thinks it needs to change, especially to make it more inclusive and less biased. Towards the end, Deepu shared about developer experience, a topic that he is highly passionate about, on why it is becoming more important and some tips for building a good developer experience. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:21] Being a Polyglot Developer - [00:08:25] Should We Become Polyglot Developers? - [00:12:05] Tips for New Engineers - [00:15:14] Learning a New Language - [00:18:29] Building Index for Learning - [00:22:16] Broken Interview Practices - [00:25:27] Importance of Developer Experience - [00:28:50] Building a Good Developer Experience - [00:32:55] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:37:33] _____ Deepu K Sasidharan’s Bio Deepu is a polyglot developer and OSS aficionado. He mainly works with Java, JS, Rust, and Golang. He co-leads JHipster and created the JDL Studio and KDash. He’s a Senior Developer Advocate for DevOps at Okta. He is also an international speaker and published author. Deepu is an enthusiast of cloud & container technology, and he is passionate about developer experience and user experience. Follow Deepu: Website – https://deepu.tech/ Twitter – @deepu105 LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/deepu05/ GitHub – https://github.com/deepu105 Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/63.

“Coding well with others or being a team player is at the heart of everything we do as developers. Unless you’re coding yourself for a piece of software that only you are going to use, you’re not a solo developer." Fernando Doglio is the author of “Skills of a Software Developer”. In this episode, Fernando shared some insights from his book on how to be a successful software developer. He highlighted that software development is a mostly a team effort and shared tips on how we can work well within a team, including not to fall into the trap of over-engineering and early optimization. He then shared some practical tips on technical interviews and what we should avoid writing in our resume. Towards the end, Fernando gave his tips to aspiring authors who want to write a technical book and cleared some misconceptions and mental blocks that may stop a lot of them from writing. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:34] Skills of a Software Developer - [00:09:05] Everyone Can Be a Successful Developer - [00:11:34] Tips to Work Well in a Team - [00:14:47] Avoiding Overengineering - [00:16:35] Focus on Working Code First, Then Optimize It - [00:20:30] Writing Readable Code - [00:24:46] Tips on Technical Interviews - [00:28:26] Tips for Writing Technical Books - [00:34:07] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:40:56] _____ Fernando Doglio’s Bio Fernando Doglio is a Data Engineering Manager at Accenture and has over 18 years of experience in the software industry, from web development to big data. Fernando loves to tinker and learn, and has written several technical blogs and books such as Node.js and React. His latest book, “Skills of a Software Developer”, is currently available through the Manning Early Access Program, and he’s open to talk about the industry, possible projects, or any help regarding choice of tech-stack. Follow Fernando: Twitter – @deleteman123 LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/fernandodoglio/ Medium – https://deleteman123.medium.com/ Website – https://www.fdoglio.com/ Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/62.

“Understanding what makes code readable from a cognitive perspective will help you design better. There are so many areas of programming where knowing something about knowing is just going to make you happier and more effective." Felienne Hermans is the author of “The Programmer’s Brain” and an Associate Professor at Leiden University. She is also the creator of the Hedy programming language, the co-founder of Joy of Coding conference, and a host at Software Engineering Radio podcast. In this episode, Felienne explained why programming is one of the most demanding cognitive activities and described the three different cognitive processes involved. We discussed why code reading is hard and how to get better at it, the connection between programming and spoken languages, naming things and why it is so important to get it right, and how to avoid having bugs in our thinking. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:09] Kids Learning Programming - [00:06:15] Writing “The Programmer’s Brain” - [00:08:58] Programming as a Demanding Cognitive Ability - [00:11:19] Code Reading is So Hard- [00:16:23] 3 Cognitive Processes - [00:19:32] How to Improve Code Reading Skills - [00:22:09] Power of Chunking - [00:25:07] Learning Programming and Spoken Language - [00:27:35] Bugs in Thinking - [00:31:02] Naming Things is Hard - [00:34:32] Code with Bad Names Has More Bugs - [00:37:36] Mental Models - [00:41:31] Other Cognitive Aspects - [00:42:45] Impact of Interruptions - [00:44:37] 2 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:46:46] _____ Felienne Hermans’s Bio Felienne Hermans is an Associate Professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science at Leiden University, where she heads the PERL research group, focused on programming education. She also teaches prospective computer science teachers at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Felienne is the creator of the Hedy programming language, and was one of the founders of the Joy of Coding conference. Since 2016, she has been a host at Software Engineering Radio, one of the most popular software engineering podcasts on the web. Felienne is also the author of “The Programmer’s Brain” a book that helps programmers understand how their brains work and how to use it more effectively. In 2021, Felienne was awarded the Dutch Prize for ICT research. Felienne is a member the board of I&I, the Dutch association of high-school computer science teachers, and of TC39, the committee that designs JavaScript. Follow Felienne: Website – https://www.felienne.com/ Twitter – @Felienne LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/felienne Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/61.

“Software engineering involves a lot of decisions, and that decision has some trade-offs. We have pros and cons. It’s not like one decision is always better than the other." Tomasz Lelek is the author of “Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs”. In this episode, Tomasz shared what led him to write his book and one of the past software mistakes from his career experience. He also gave advice on how software developers should approach the potential software mistakes and explained some typical trade-offs when making software engineering design decisions, such as code duplication vs flexibility, premature optimization vs optimizing hot-path, data locality and memory, and finally delivery semantics in distributed systems. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:00] Why Write about Software Mistakes and Trade-offs - [00:07:42] Software Mistake Experience - [00:10:16] Tips for Software Developers - [00:13:08] Trade-off 1: Code Duplication vs Flexibility - [00:15:24] Trade-off 2: Premature Optimization vs Optimizing Hot-Path - [00:20:08] Trade-off 3: Data Locality and Memory - [00:25:02] Trade-off 4: Delivery Semantics in Distributed Systems - [00:33:01] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:40:28] _____ Tomasz Lelek’s Bio Tomasz currently works at Datastax, building products around one of the world’s favorite distributed databases - Cassandra. He contributes to Java-Driver, Cassandra-Quarkus, Cassandra-Kafka connector, and Stargate. He previously worked at Allegro, an e-commerce website in Poland, working on streaming, batch, and online systems serving millions of users. He is also a published author of “Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs: Making good programming decisions” that is focusing on real-world problems you may encounter in your production systems. Follow Tomasz: LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomaszlelek/ Twitter – @tomekl007 GitHub – https://github.com/tomekl007 Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/60.