Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
Effective habit change comes from identifying the single root cause-the "stick"-and removing it, turning effort into instant, visible progress.
Great engineers win by solving user problems, aligning teams, shipping early, and valuing clarity over cleverness-practical habits that boost impact and career growth.
Promotions come from consistently acting in your manager's role for months, not from one-off wins; take ownership, propose solutions, and demonstrate the mindset before the title arrives.
Clear policies like email curfews, transparent decision channels, and small recognition gestures can dramatically boost remote team morale, reducing burnout and lifting performance.
Executives promote engineers who deliver business impact, not just code; the article distills five traits-shipping complete products, speeding the org, doing dirty work, growing others, and anticipating problems-that fast-track promotions.
Boris shows how to run multiple Claude Code agents in parallel, use plan mode, slash commands, a shared CLAUDE.md, and verification hooks to turn AI into a reliable teammate for faster, safer code reviews.
I think the center of software work is moving.
Leaders shift from executing concrete tasks to shaping strategy: directors must focus on the Why, scale the How across teams, and use influence rather than authority to drive outcomes.
Leaders must model values daily, call out misaligned behavior, and use transparent communication and deliberate acknowledgment to embed an engineering culture that scales.
Leaders must balance direct visibility with empowerment; the piece shows how micromanagement fears arise from MBO misuse and offers a mission-command lens to keep leadership close to reality without stifling teams.
AI makes radiology and software work cheaper, which drives more imaging and more engineering, proving efficiency creates demand and amplifies the value of human expertise.
Amazon's senior engineering open house shows how clear role hierarchies and one-way decision gates enable massive scale, giving leaders concrete rules for balancing reversible speed with irreversible choices.
Every process decision is a decision about autonomy. Good processes clarify boundaries so teams move faster. Bad processes add gatekeepers who make everyone wait.
Detached leaders create friction-filled teams because efficiency without humanity weakens performance. Full attention, positive assumptions, and inviting early disagreement build the connections that make hard work easier.
When your CEO demands productivity metrics, offer them something better: a shared vision of excellence they can actually invest in.
Managers interrupt because they're being interrupted. They make bad technical decisions because they're pressured to make any decision. Understanding why doesn't excuse it, but it points toward what actually works.
Static analysis shows you exactly where your codebase is bleeding. The trick is making your team actually care about stopping it.
Remote engineering teams aren't harder to manage. They just expose the communication gaps that in-person meetings used to paper over.
Rippling deliberately understaffs every project because constraint forces clarity and busy teams eliminate the low-value work that fills available capacity.
If you could say the same praise to a dog who fetched a stick, it's probably useless feedback for your engineer.
Effective managing up means giving concise, anticipatory updates, understanding your boss's priorities, and offering solutions, so you build influence, avoid surprises, and advance your career.
Most Definitions of Done only check if features work. They should also check if your architecture can survive the next six months.
Engineering dogmas exist because they solved a real problem once. Then they became unquestionable gospel that solves yesterday's problems while creating tomorrow's headaches.
Flexible work policies, mental-health resources, and engagement measurement cut burnout and turnover, giving leaders concrete ways to keep talent and boost productivity.
Your quick decision-making saved your startup but will sink your Fortune 500 one-way door. The superpower that got you promoted becomes your Achilles heel when the context shifts.
AI tools let engineering managers shrink the costly ramp of junior developers, turning them into faster-learning, higher-return hires.
LLMs can generate code, but that's not the job anymore. The job is delivering code with proof it works: manual testing you can show in the PR, automated tests that would fail without your change, and taking full accountability for what ships.
Good architecture upgrades the problems you solve, turning simple tradeoffs into richer challenges that deliver higher impact, as shown by Netflix's shift to global personalization models.
Technical leaders should treat themselves as a three-quarter-full cup, keeping space for external input while still projecting confidence when optics demand a full cup.
A curated list of real-world career ladders from companies like Figma, Wise, GitLab, and Meetup, showing how they structure roles, expectations, and compensation to guide growth and fairness.
Don't let meetings overlap on your calendar. Resolve conflicts immediately or pay compound interest on the chaos later.
The burnout that shows up even when you love the work is the quiet kind where passion stops protecting you and your brain goes null.
Six dimensions that compound: joy sustains energy, trust accelerates decisions, purpose focuses effort, safety unlocks candor, ownership drives execution, growth keeps improving.
Leaders often dodge feedback because it feels personal, but the article gives five concrete ways to ask for input that boost meetings, align with values, and improve team performance.
Tech debt is a strategic signal about trade-offs and system health, not a moral failing; treat it with intent, visibility, and business impact.
Engineering managers must shift from shielding teams to proving impact, shipping visible value, and owning customer dialogue in the post-ZIRP operator era.
Effective decisions need three elements-trigger, desired future, and action-plus context, conditions, scenarios, and analysis, a simple model technical leaders can apply to any choice.
Strategy is a decision-making framework that defines what to do and what to skip; the article gives a crisp definition and three actionable models-Rumelt's Kernel, Playing to Win, and Three Horizons-to turn vague "be more strategic" feedback into concrete trade-offs.
A tech lead succeeds by raising the technical bar, mentoring engineers, and building autonomous teams-delivering clear architecture, intentional debt, and fast decision-making without becoming a bottleneck.
Labeling the relationships between goals, initiatives, and other operating-system elements exposes hidden assumptions that shape strategy execution, helping leaders pick models that scale and avoid misaligned cascades.
The difference between useful and useless feedback is specificity. Ask concrete questions that force concrete answers, not vague prompts that get vague responses.
Technical debt is a purposeful shortcut to get feedback fast, not a bug; treat it like a credit card and refactor quickly to avoid costly interest.
Productivity gains come from eliminating developer friction-slow pull-request cycles, clunky infrastructure, and high cognitive load-rather than chasing raw output metrics.
Apply Charlie Munger's inversion mental model to engineering planning: flip success into failure scenarios to uncover blind spots, avoid optimism traps, and ship more reliable features.
Incidental complexity in code accumulates like a fern's massive genome, and leaders must favor simple, maintainable solutions over quick fixes to keep velocity and product health.
Managers can stay effective by writing small, high-impact code pieces using AI assistants, focusing on low-interrupt, high-value tasks and applying strict rules to avoid time-sensitive or low-value work.
Manager READMEs often create an info bubble; senior leaders get better results by using simple templates and regular ceremonies that surface wins, challenges, and decisions without over-structuring communication.
Software is getting cheaper and easier to build, causing startups to postpone development; leaders must shift from rapid building to distribution and differentiation.
The stdlib collection is a community-curated library of practical, immediately useful, battle-tested resources for technical leadership. Each resource is designed to be immediately applicable to your role. New resources are added based on community feedback and emerging best practices.