Tech Lead Journal

Jeff Perry, author of 'The Intentional Engineer,' discusses the importance of being intentional in your engineering career. He shares insights on identifying core values, the power of mindsets, getting career clarity, finding genius zones, and essential skills for living more intentionally. Learn how to assess your current situation and start becoming more intentional towards your life and career.

Andrew Bartlow, co-founder of the People Leader Accelerator and co-author of “Scaling for Success”, discusses common challenges faced by high-growth organizations and strategies for successful scaling. He cautions against blindly adopting best practices, emphasizes the importance of a unique people's playbook, and highlights 7 key people practices including organizational structure, learning & development, and culture & engagement.

Wouter Groeneveld, the author of 'The Creative Programmer', discusses the 7 dimensions of highly creative programmers. Topics include: reasons software projects fail, personal knowledge management, collaboration, constraints, critical thinking, minimizing distractions, and online presence.

Agile leadership expert Gil Broza shares insights on leveling up the value delivery system to deliver better results. He discusses systems thinking, ways of working, mindset, and the importance of prioritizing people. He introduces the SQUARE Model and offers strategies for enhancing fitness level. Key topics include reinforcing and balancing loops, clear decision making, and the dangers of metrics.

“A lot of developers tie their self-worth to their code. Being able to let go of your ego and understanding the feedback is based on the code, and it has nothing to do with anything about me. It’s just the code.” Adrienne Tacke is a software engineer, keynote speaker, and the author of the upcoming book “Looks Good To Me”. In this episode, we discuss code reviews and why it is an essential part of the software development process. Adrienne discusses the importance and benefits of code review, the common code review workflow and the different roles involved, how to provide effective code review comments, and why we should leverage on code review tools and automation. She also provides tips on how to speed up our code review turnaround time.   Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:03:31] Looks Good to Me (LGTM) - [00:09:05] Code Review Story - [00:12:24] Importance of Code Review - [00:15:38] Code Review Benefits - [00:20:27] Code Review Role: Author - [00:25:50] Code Review Role: Reviewer - [00:32:42] Code Review Role: The Team - [00:38:41] Code Review Tools & Automation - [00:45:53] Effective Code Review Comments - [00:51:44] Code Review Turnaround - [00:57:45] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [01:04:56] _____ Adrienne Tacke’s BioAdrienne is a Filipina software engineer, keynote speaker, author of the best-selling book Coding for Kids: Python, and a LinkedIn Learning instructor who’s reached over 65,000 learners with her courses (a number she’ll likely surpass when you read this). She is writing Looks Good To Me: Constructive Code Reviews, a labor of love that she hopes will improve code reviews everywhere. Perhaps most important, however, is that she spends way too much money on desserts and ungodly amounts of time playing Age of Empires II. Follow Adrienne: LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/adriennetacke Twitter / X – @AdrienneTacke Instagram – @adriennetacke Website – adrienne.io _____ Our Sponsors Miro is your team's visual workspace to connect, collaborate, and create innovations together, from anywhere. Sign up today at miro.com/podcast and get your first 3 Miro boards free forever. Like this episode? Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/159. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Buy me a coffee or become a patron.

Manoj Awasthi, CTO at JULO and previously the SVP of Engineering at Tokopedia, discusses the role of a senior engineering leader, scaling engineering teams, hiring engineers, hiring engineering managers, and creating culture alignment.

Mauricio Aniche, author of Effective Software Testing, discusses effective testing techniques in software development including the testing pyramid, specification-based testing, and behavior-driven design. He emphasizes the importance of developers taking responsibility for testing their code and explains the benefits of automated testing. The podcast also covers the challenge of convincing developers to write tests and the ongoing debate between integration tests and unit tests. Aniche highlights the significance of understanding program requirements and explores the relationship between specification-based testing and behavior-driven design.

Margaret-Anne Storey and Abi Noda discuss the misuse of DORA metrics and introduce three core dimensions of developer experience: feedback loops, cognitive load, and flow state.

Abi Noda, CEO & co-founder of DX, talks about the trend of measuring developer productivity and experience, challenges with traditional metrics, and research-based approaches to improve developer productivity.

Daniel Luebke, software architect and co-author of 'Patterns for API Design', discusses API design patterns and best practices. Topics include understanding domain requirements, loosely coupled message exchanges, and API and message best practices.