
Tech Lead Journal
Great technical leadership requires more than just great coding skills. It requires a variety of other skills that are not well-defined, and they are not something that we can fully learn in any school or book. Hear from experienced technical leaders sharing their journey and philosophy for building great technical teams and achieving technical excellence. Find out what makes them great and how to apply those lessons to your work and team.
Latest episodes

Feb 15, 2021 • 58min
#26 - Experience Design—Apple's Best Kept Secret - Tim Kobe
"Most people confuse a technical capability with technology. Ultimately, technology is a technical capability plus the human outcome that it creates."
Tim Kobe is a design leader, author, and founder of Eight Inc., a global award-winning strategic design firm also widely recognized as “Apple’s best kept secret”. In this episode, we looked at how successful brands build radical impact by creating ground-breaking human experiences with design.
We started off with Tim’s career journey, the founding of Eight Inc., and how he ended up working with Steve Jobs for over 12 years, including coming up with the original design of the iconic Apple’s flagship stores. Tim also shared how he sees Steve Job’s mission to democratize technology and how he helped Apple built a unique branded experience. We then dived deep into Experience Design (XD), starting with understanding the human outcomes to building the strategy and tactics to create value with a unique human experience. We also discussed how Asia is evolving in Experience Design and how COVID has been dramatically changing the world. Tim also spoke about the massive impact of AI & ML that is yet to be witnessed. Towards the end, Tim shared insights about some future trends that he is currently working on to transform the industries and shape the future in human connection from retail, banking, real estate, telecommunication, and even government!
Listen out for:
Career Journey - [00:06:29]
Apple’s Strong Brand & Best Kept Secret - [00:11:55]
Apple Stores Concept - [00:16:20]
On Steve Jobs - [00:19:39]
Experience Design (XD)- [00:21:14]
Design Thinking - [00:27:49]
Digital Products & Design - [00:28:59]
COVID Impact - [00:32:32]
AI/ML in XD - [00:37:08]
Asia’s Promise & Notable Brands - [00:44:02]
The Future Trends - [00:50:21]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:55:01]
_____
Tim Kobe’s Bio
Tim Kobe is a design leader, author, and founder of the globally recognized strategic and experience design firm Eight Inc.
For almost 30 years in design and a leader in Innovation and Branded Experience, Eight Inc. has worked with companies such as Apple, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Nike, Coke, Knoll and Citibank. The firm takes on an interdisciplinary and holistic approach, working across traditional disciplines including strategy, architecture, exhibition, interior design, product, communications and branding. Many projects have received international design awards and have been published across Asia, Europe, and the United States. Eight Inc. has studios in San Francisco, New York, Honolulu, Tokyo, London, Singapore, Dubai, Istanbul and across China.
Kobe is a keynote speaker and speaks on topics surrounding design, innovation, technology and business valuation for many internationally known forums. He has been featured and recognized for his work in prominent publications like Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, The Economist, Dezeen and Fast Company.
Follow Tim:
Twitter – https://twitter.com/TimKobe
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/timkobe/
Email – kobe@eightinc.com
Eight Inc – https://eightinc.com/
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Feb 8, 2021 • 56min
#25 - Software Craftsmanship & Modernization - Sandro Mancuso
Sandro Mancuso, a software craftsman and co-founder of Codurance, shares his journey from Brazil to becoming a leader in the tech industry. He discusses the essence of software craftsmanship, advocating for maintainable and adaptable code that developers can trust. Sandro delves into software modernization, emphasizing pragmatic approaches and the necessity for continuous learning and collaboration in tech teams. He also highlights the balance between innovation and practicality, urging technologists to align their work with business objectives while embracing craftsmanship in their careers.

Feb 1, 2021 • 1h 2min
#24 - Best Practices for Your Developer Onboarding Process - Tanaka Mutakwa
“When you recruit an engineer on your team, you actually want to make sure from their first day on, you give them the smoothest entry into your company and help them and assist them in as many ways as you can to become productive as fast as possible."
Tanaka Mutakwa is the VP of Engineering at Names & Faces and the founder of the Tech Leadership community in South Africa. In this episode, Tanaka shared with me his best practices for onboarding new technical hires and developers into the team. We started off by discussing tech landscape, startup scenes, and tech communities in Africa (in particular South Africa). Then we dived deep into the onboarding best practices ranging from technical aspects (such as tools and technologies), domain knowledge, and importance of soft skills. Tanaka also shared with me a lifestyle brand/movement that he has been championing called “NoDaysOff”, which has a mission to inspire people to chase their goals and dreams consistently.
Listen out for:
Names & Faces - [00:06:06]
Career Journey - [00:07:31]
Tech Landscape in Africa - [00:13:13]
Tech Communities in Africa - [00:19:54]
Onboarding New Software Engineers - [00:24:26]
Pair Programming - [00:31:36]
Importance of Documentation - [00:34:15]
Domain Knowledge - [00:36:44]
Developers Lack of Interest in Business - [00:38:48]
Understanding Tech vs Business Constraints - [00:42:40]
Importance of Soft Skills - [00:44:36]
Tips for Improving Soft Skills - [00:50:01]
NoDaysOff - [00:52:31]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:57:12]
_____
Tanaka Mutakwa’s Bio
Tanaka Mutakwa is the VP of Engineering at Names & Faces. His job is to make everyone in the engineering organisation successful by influencing architectural decisions, establishing best practises, setting work cadences and cultural norms and overcoming the issues that get in the way of the team’s success. Tanaka is also the founder of a lifestyle brand / movement called NoDaysOff and the founder / organiser of the Tech Leadership community in South Africa.
Follow Tanaka:
Website – https://www.mutakwa.com/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/generalmutakwa
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/trmutakwa/
“The New Developer” newsletter – https://thenewdeveloper.substack.com/
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Jan 25, 2021 • 57min
#23 - Earn People & Leadership Lessons From Hyperscaling Gojek - Ajey Gore
“I always deliver myself against these four things: you should stay true to learning; be curious, understand what is going on; optimize for people, don’t optimize for money; and if you want to do something, there’s only one reason to do it, that you want to do it."
Ajey Gore is an Operating Partner at Sequoia Capital India who was previously the Group CTO of Gojek. He helped build a strong Gojek engineering team with his passion, strategic insight, and innovative mindset, which was highly crucial in transforming Gojek to become Indonesia’s first decacorn. In this episode, Ajey shared his deep beliefs and motto of “earn people, not money” in various aspects of his career and life. We started from his sharing of his journey at Thoughtworks and what he learned there that helped shape a lot of his growth and leadership. Ajey eventually made a bold move, starting his startup journey which led him to founding CodeIgnition which was then acquired by Gojek. Ajey shared a lot about his exhilarating challenges and journey in Gojek, which includes the different Gojek scale and stages he went through, crucial technologies, and architecture decisions. He also shared his views about hiring and leadership that played critical parts to Gojek’s success. We also discussed briefly the importance of community contributions and his advice for fresh graduates to succeed in their career. At the end, I asked Ajey a philosophical question on how we should figure out what to optimize for in our life and career.
Listen out for:
Career Journey - [00:08:11]
Role in Sequoia - [00:10:36]
Impact of COVID for Startups - [00:12:20]
ThoughtWorks Journey - [00:14:38]
Earn People, Not Money - [00:18:38]
Moving to Startup - [00:22:34]
Starting CodeIgnition - [00:23:50]
Acquired by Gojek - [00:26:47]
First Role in Gojek - [00:28:31]
Gojek Scale and Stages - [00:30:01]
Crucial Technologies and Architecture - [00:34:59]
On Hiring - [00:39:14]
On Leadership - [00:45:19]
Community Contributions - [00:47:58]
Advice for Fresh Graduates - [00:49:26]
What to Optimize in Life - [00:51:27]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:53:48]
_____
Ajey Gore’s Bio
Ajey is an Operating Partner - Technology with Sequoia Capital India, based in Singapore. He works closely with Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s portfolio CTOs and CPOs to provide insight and expertise in building and scaling engineering, data science, product and design functions, and helps them build and mentor high-performing teams across Southeast Asia.
Prior to joining Sequoia, Ajey was the Group CTO of Gojek. Ajey earlier founded CodeIgnition, which was acquired by Gojek. He has also served as the CTO for hoppr, which was acquired by Hike Messenger, and was Head of Technology for ThoughtWorks.
Ajey has a B. Com degree in Commerce, Mathematics, and Statistics from University of Allahabad and a PG Diploma in advanced software technology/Computer Science from NCST.
Follow Ajey:
Website – https://ajeygore.in
Twitter – https://twitter.com/ajeygore
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajeygore/
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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/23.

Jan 24, 2021 • 1h 2min
#22 - How to Facilitate Great Retrospectives - Aino Vonge Corry
“A retrospective is a time set aside where you are looking at what has happened, you’re appreciating what happened, and you’re learning from what happened. And then you improve the ways of how you’re doing things."
Aino Vonge Corry is an independent consultant, agile coach, and the founder of Metadeveloper. She recently published her book ”Retrospectives Antipatterns” that describes the antipatterns and mistakes that she has made from facilitating retrospectives for the past 15 years, and what we can learn to avoid those. In this episode, we had a deep discussion about retrospectives and what we should pay attention to in order to facilitate a great retrospective, ranging from elements of a good retrospective, importance of Prime Directive, cultivating trust, facilitation skills, and coming up with good retrospective outcomes. Aino also shared her interesting story on how she ended up writing ”Retrospectives Antipatterns” and what we can learn from her experience. Towards the end, Aino shared her insights on how we can use retrospective to apply in our personal lives.
Listen out for:
Career Journey - [00:05:24]
Teaching the Teachers - [00:10:57]
Metadeveloper - [00:13:43]
Retrospective - [00:14:48]
Postmortem - [00:16:31]
Elements of Good Retrospective - [00:17:56]
Retrospective Prime Directive - [00:21:51]
Trust in Retrospective - [00:23:32]
Role of a Facilitator - [00:27:08]
Dealing with Different Cultures - [00:30:31]
Presence of Managers in Retrospective - [00:32:36]
Good Retrospective Outcome - [00:35:21]
Retrospective Participation - [00:36:47]
Retrospective Preparation - [00:39:12]
Retrospective Fatigue - [00:43:16]
Retrospective Action Items - [00:45:54]
Retrospectives Antipatterns - [00:47:41]
Writing Book Tips - [00:50:36]
How to Read the Antipatterns - [00:52:06]
Personal Retrospective - [00:56:07]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:57:51]
_____
Aino Vonge Corry’s Bio
Aino Vonge Corry is an independent consultant, who sometimes works as an agile coach.
After gaining her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2001 she spent the next 10 years failing to choose between being a researcher/teacher in academia, and being a teacher/facilitator in industry. She eventually squared the circle by starting her own company, Metadeveloper, which develops developers by teaching CS, teaching how to teach CS, inviting speakers to IT conferences, and facilitating software development in various ways. She has facilitated retrospectives and other meetings for the past 15 years during which time she has made all the mistakes possible in that field.
Follow Aino:
Website - https://metadeveloper.com
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ainovongecorry
Twitter - https://twitter.com/apaipi
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Jan 11, 2021 • 1h 6min
#21 - Domain-Driven Design and Event-Driven Architecture - Vaughn Vernon
“Programmers have to come out of their cubicles. Innovative software development doesn’t happen with one person in a cubicle with great ideas. Because it’s not just even about code. Anybody can write code. It’s about what does the code accomplish. And if the code accomplishes something innovative, great!"
Vaughn Vernon is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and reactive software development. He is well-known for his best-selling DDD books and IDDD workshops. In this episode, we discussed many things about Domain-Driven Design and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). Apart from the fundamentals, Vaughn shared many of his insights around the two, such as why developers should learn more about DDD, the most important aspect of DDD, the benefits of EDA, eventual consistency, event storming, and event sourcing. Towards the end, Vaughn also gave a sneak peek about his new book “Strategic Monoliths and Microservices” and why he wrote it.
Listen out for:
Vaughn’s career journey - [00:06:44]
Domain-Driven Design - [00:16:47]
Why DDD can be expensive - [00:21:43]
Why developers need to know DDD - [00:23:59]
DDD most important thing - [00:27:15]
How to start with DDD - [00:30:05]
Event-Driven Architecture - [00:32:28]
Benefits of EDA - [00:36:00]
Eventual consistency - [00:40:13]
Event storming - [00:45:22]
Event sourcing - [00:49:13]
Vaughn’s new book - [00:53:09]
Vaughn’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [01:00:26]
_____
Vaughn Vernon’s Bio
Vaughn Vernon is an entrepreneur, software developer, and architect with more than 35 years of experience in a broad range of business domains. Vaughn is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design and reactive software development, a champion of simplicity, and he is the founder and chief architect of the VLINGO/PLATFORM. Along with his three best-selling books, Vaughn was recently commissioned by Pearson/Addison-Wesley as curator and editor of his own Vaughn Vernon Signature Series.
Follow Vaughn:
Website - https://vaughnvernon.com/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/VaughnVernon
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaughnvernon/
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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/21.

Dec 21, 2020 • 59min
#20 - Building Products People Love—Lessons from Decades at Apple and Adobe - Arno Gourdol
“The most important thing we can do in order to get whatever success we want—build the best product you can. Invest all your energy in making the product absolutely best that you can think of. If you really focus on building an absolutely best product possible, everything else will follow."
Arno is an inspiring tech leader with decades of experience in two major creative companies—Apple and Adobe. I’m honored to have him sharing his career journey and passion in this episode. Arno shared his amazing start of his career at Apple, especially when Steve Jobs came back and led the company back to focus, which was the key success factor that brought Apple to where it is today. The entire company had to adapt to Steve Jobs’s new ways of working and to work in an iterative fast paced approach, at the time when Agile was not yet widely known, including how Arno led a complete rewrite of the macOS Finder. Then Arno shared his next illustrious career at Adobe, where he had the opportunities to explore different projects and establish his engineering leadership skills. Arno led an audacious move when he proposed Adobe to open source XMP, a bold action when open sourcing wasn’t common back then. He also shared his lessons in dealing with halted projects, and the perspective that we should embrace when that happens. Arno then shared his invaluable wisdom on how to build products that people love and what to focus on in order to create successful products. Right at the end, Arno shared with me what made him decide to end his career and pursue the things he is truly passionate about.
Listen out for:
Arno’s career start - [00:08:07]
Journey at Apple - [00:11:44]
Steve Jobs impact - [00:14:17]
Apple’s key success factor - [00:19:08]
Working in agile manner - [00:20:40]
Building without clear direction - [00:24:38]
Tips when revamping product - [00:26:53]
How to decide a technical rewrite - [00:30:36]
Journey at Adobe - [00:33:00]
Contributing to open source - [00:37:18]
Dealing with canceled projects - [00:40:33]
Director of products - [00:43:56]
Building products people love - [00:45:36]
Arno’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:47:42]
Why Arno decided to pursue his passion - [00:53:09]
_____
Arno Gourdol’s Bio
After a tech career at Adobe and Apple, Arno now travels around the world to capture beautiful landscapes with his camera—living life to the fullest spending time on things he is passionate about. Arno is also an active contributor to some open source projects that he is passionate about.
Follow Arno:
Website- https://www.arno.org/
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnog/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/arnog
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/arnog/
GitHub - https://github.com/arnog
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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/20.

Dec 14, 2020 • 56min
#19 - Scaling Collaboration Across the Globe - Ranganathan Balashanmugam
“With machines, you know there are limitations. You can’t go beyond that. You have to upgrade your machines. Or the technology changes. But with people, the interesting part is: if you get all the parts right, the sum of the parts will be definitely greater than adding them together."
Ranganathan Balashanmugam is the co-founder and CTO of EverestEngineering. He is passionate about scaling and leading distributed teams, where most of us can relate to with the remote working becoming a norm nowadays. I had a pleasant conversation with him in this episode to discuss many strategies and thought leadership on how to lead a distributed team by taking parallel from distributed system, overcoming challenges of building a team with different culture, and how to nurture a team. We started with him sharing his career journey and interesting story of him conquering the Mount Everest Base Camp, where he gained some insights and inspiration throughout the trek. Ranga then shared what led him to take his first management role and developed strategies around scaling distribution teams over the years. We then discussed about hiring and onboarding, the concept of orchestration vs choreography when managing a team, and the qualities of an excellent leader. At the end, Ranga also shared about EverestEngineering and its differentiators to ensure good engineering quality for their clients.
Listen out for:
Ranganathan’s career journey - [00:06:16]
Trip to Mount Everest - [00:08:19]
How Ranga took management role - [00:12:55]
Scaling distributed teams - [00:14:43]
Onboarding new joiner - [00:26:23]
Orchestration vs choreography - [00:31:01]
What makes a good manager/leader - [00:36:41]
EverestEngineering - [00:43:13]
Ensuring good engineering quality - [00:47:09]
Ranga’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:52:27]
_____
Ranganathan Balashanmugam’s Bio
Ranga has worked with globally distributed teams for the last fifteen years. He graduated as a civil engineer and became a developer for nearly eleven years. He worked on web, mobile, and distributed technologies to scale software. Later he picked up operations and engineering management at Aconex, where there were teams distributed in four different time zones.
He is currently co-founder and CTO of EverestEngineering, which he scaled the organization to 80+ people in the last two years, in three other regions. He is passionate about scaling and leading distributed teams.
Microsoft MVP for Data Platform - 2016, 2017.
Experience in building two startups.
Speaker at many international conferences and meetups
Experience in building distributed high-performance teams and offices.
Organizer of one of the top technology meetups - Hyderabad Scalability Meetup.
Follow Ranga:
Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ranganathanb
Twitter – https://twitter.com/ran_than
Medium – https://medium.com/@ran_than
SlideShare – https://www.slideshare.net/techmaddy
Follow EverestEngineering:
Website – https://everest.engineering
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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/19.

Dec 7, 2020 • 1h 16min
#18 - Succeeding in Tech & Cloud Latest - Kelsey Hightower
“What I come to realize is that technology doesn’t move that fast. The fundamentals are roughly the same. It’s the fact that we don’t necessarily teach fundamentals. When you start to focus on the fundamentals, then you don’t mentally get attached to one particular implementation."
Kelsey Hightower is one of the leading figures in open source, cloud computing, and Kubernetes. I’m extremely excited to have him with me sharing a lot of his insights around many things in tech. We started the conversation with what he has been doing recently—his involvement in serverless technologies and security landscape. Kelsey then shared his interesting career journey of how he got from working at fast food in high school to where he is at Google today. He also shared his advice on how one should learn and develop knowledge in the current fast changing technology landscape, and how he shifted his learning mindset to overcome impostor syndrome. Kelsey also discussed various latest updates on cloud, serverless technologies, and Kubernetes. He also shared how he has developed his fundamental understanding of certain technologies by learning them “the hard way” and publicly. We also covered his latest observation and views on microservices vs monolith. Last but not least, we close off the session with Kelsey’s Tech Lead Wisdom on his take around personal growth, learning, and his preferred way of leading by inspiring others.
Listen out for:
What Kelsey is up to - [00:06:39]
Kelsey’s career journey - [00:10:15]
Succeeding in tech from under-represented groups - [00:13:21]
Understanding technology fundamentals - [00:16:45]
Impostor syndrome - [00:21:19]
On cloud latest and cloud native - [00:27:51]
Twelve-Factor application - [00:34:00]
Serverless latest - [00:36:14]
Monolith vs microservices - [00:42:44]
Learning things The Hard Way - [00:54:20]
Kubernetes-ify everything - [01:02:15]
Kubernetes resources - [01:08:54]
Kelsey’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [01:12:13]
_____
Kelsey Hightower’s Bio
Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, but most enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming and system administration to his favorite Linux distro of the month.
Follow Kelsey:
Twitter – https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower
Github - https://github.com/kelseyhightower
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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/18.

Nov 30, 2020 • 1h 4min
#17 - Remote Work & Asynchronous Communication at Doist - Gonçalo Silva
“Asynchronous communication promotes flow. And flow is generally what we’re all looking for. Not only because it’s more productive. Not only it’s because it’s within this state that we produce the best work. It’s also within this state that we feel the most fulfilled."
Gonçalo is the CTO of Doist, the remote-first company behind Todoist and Twist that has a mission of building the future of work by creating tools that promote more fulfilling ways to work and live. Doist has been a remote-first company practically since the founder started working on Todoist in 2007 and with its first remote hire in 2011.
In this episode, I learned a lot from Gonçalo about Doist and its remote working history and culture, including some advantages and disadvantages of remote work. We also discussed at length about having asynchronous communication as the first preferred communication style instead of synchronous, and why it is such an important communication style to adopt in a remote team. Gonçalo then shares about Doist core values, the cornerstone of every single thing that Doist does as company, from creating processes to decision making and recruiting. Towards the end, Gonçalo also shares some engineering and technical practices that Doist does, especially the ones important for a successful remote team, including the importance of pre-allocation and prioritization.
Listen out for:
About Doist - [00:05:59]
Gonçalo’s career journey - [00:06:52]
Doist remote work history - [00:10:30]
Remote work advantages & disadvantages - [00:13:01]
Asynchronous vs synchronous - [00:18:53]
Handling emergencies - [00:25:10]
On meeting and real-time chat - [00:26:48]
Hiring and onboarding - [00:30:38]
Doist 5 core values - [00:39:01]
Role of a manager - [00:41:07]
Technical practices - [00:42:47]
Prioritization - [00:48:55]
Doist architecture - [00:54:04]
Remote work resources - [00:55:48]
Gonçalo’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:56:54]
_____
Gonçalo Silva’s Bio
Gonçalo is the CTO of Doist, creators of Todoist and Twist. He’s been working remotely for over a decade and managing remote teams for most of that time. He loves long-term ambition, asynchronous communication, and programming.
Follow Gonçalo:
Twitter – https://twitter.com/goncalossilva
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/goncalossilva/
Follow Doist:
Website – https://doist.com/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/doist
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/doist/
YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/user/DoistApps
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/doistofficial
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