Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
Every line of code you write creates an ongoing obligation to maintain it—security patches, API updates, compliance changes. Most organizations don't account for this hidden cost and end up drowning.
A Diversity & Inclusion rewrite of John Cutler's red-flag list, highlighting phrases that expose bias in hiring, promotion, and workplace culture.
A recent failed intro call shows how even seasoned advisors stumble when unprepared, and why recognizing imperfections and planning ahead is essential for technical leaders.
Labeling coworkers as lazy or incompetent ignores situational factors; the article shows how this bias damages performance, collaboration and retention.
A 500-line Phaser.js dinosaur game built in an hour shows how event loops, state management, and responsive design used in games map directly to enterprise app development.
Productivity metrics mislead knowledge workers; leaders should replace output-based measures with outcome-focused indicators that boost results, health, and morale.
Guillermo Lechuga shows how leaders who model the behavior they demand-accountability, feedback, and humility-directly shape team morale and performance, and offers concrete self-reflection exercises to break blame cycles.
Tech managers boost team motivation by focusing on purpose, autonomy, growth, recognition, and inclusive culture rather than just salary.
Fear makes teams tiptoe; building safety nets like backups, feature flags, and feedback systems lets them sprint faster and make better decisions.
A weekly triage engineer rotation lets engineers learn by fixing issues while shielding teammates, improving focus, reducing burnout, and building more resilient systems.
Learn how to categorize decisions by difficulty and apply the right tool-checklists, OODA loops, WRAP, or stakeholder maps-to make faster, better choices and avoid costly overanalysis.
Effective backlog grooming prevents hidden scope creep, keeps teams focused, and avoids the ruinous pitfalls that stall delivery.
Engineering leaders regain deep focus by eliminating multitasking, setting clear limits, and using simple routines like single-task windows and structured breaks.
Replace story-point estimation with measured cycle time to get concrete delivery dates and confidence levels, using simple spreadsheet formulas and scatter plots.
A therapist's diagnosis of burnout shows how workplace labeling creates power hierarchies, shaping morale and leadership decisions.
Platform teams shape culture through product features, not policies - make the right thing easy and engineers will copy-paste their way to better practices
Treat engineering excellence like Vitamin E: continuously measure system health and embed quality work to curb technical debt, keeping teams fast and resilient.
A performance plan isn't a death sentence; by accepting the feedback, clarifying expectations, focusing on the work, and exceeding them, you can turn a failing review into a career win.
Critical teams that own essential work can be rescued by a stark diagnosis, swapping the manager, and systematically tightening process, culture, and mission.
Traditional functional orgs dilute ownership; aligning teams around specific business goals and metrics gives clear accountability and cuts cross-team friction.
AI-driven code generation speeds output but worsens delivery risk; the article argues that Extreme Programming's intentional constraints, like pair programming, are more needed than ever to keep software human-centric.
Engineering leaders often know what to do but fail to act because of motivation, confidence, prioritization, and organizational barriers; addressing these factors closes the knowing-doing gap and boosts team performance.
MSMG can fast-track growth by leaning into strengths, but it blinds leaders to hidden gaps; real stories show when mentorship and fresh perspective beat the heuristic.
A manager can close the performance gap by defining five concrete building blocks-role clarity, rapid trust, clear rules, big-picture connectivity, and multidirectional feedback-to craft a healthy working environment.
Your calendar is 100% meeting'd up. You sneak out of Zoom sessions for bathroom breaks, hoping nobody notices. Seven hours of meetings daily with no time to do the work that comes out of meetings.
Merchant's vivid history of the Luddite rebellion shows technology isn't inevitable; leaders can shape automation's impact on workers and profit.
Refactoring fear blinds teams; treating it as a continuous, incremental activity reveals hidden improvement opportunities and avoids costly rewrites.
Sergio's August reading highlights Blood in the Machine—you've been lied to about the Luddites. They weren't anti-tech; they were fighting automation used to degrade work and concentrate power.
The post argues that while LLMs won't become super-intelligent soon, they will deliver substantial, practical advancements in the next 2-5 years, reshaping real-world applications without delivering sci-fi level AI.
A leader learns to spot early stress signals-stress scores, missed meals, sleep loss, and neglected exercise-through a surreal hotel giraffe metaphor, showing how daily self-care habits prevent rage and burnout.
Melinda Seckington's theory: eldest daughters have been training for team glue work since childhood, keeping peace, organizing chaos, picking up slack. Her poll showed 60% of glue workers are eldest daughters.
Code reviews are most valuable when they become intentional knowledge-sharing moments that raise the whole team's capability rather than just a bug-catching gate.
Focusing on a company's unique strengths yields outsized impact, while chasing weaknesses wastes effort; the piece shows how to identify and apply durable differentiated strengths as a strategic moat.
Learn how engineers can ease their manager's load by mastering curiosity, understanding manager priorities, building strong relationships, and making their boss look good.
A lean, automation-first workflow turns Google Maps results into qualified coliving and coworking leads, letting a two-person team build a 120-partner network with minimal manual effort.
Burnout stems from a lack of believable motivation, not just long hours-breaks won't fix it. Engineers need real purpose to stay energized.
Effective developer onboarding hinges on well-crafted documentation and checklists that give new hires clear tools, tasks, and contacts, letting them ship code within the first week.
Leaders should constantly question whether a task is the highest-impact use of effort, using a checklist of why, metric relevance, sunk cost, and customer value to avoid blind commitment.
Leaders must announce upcoming change with clear facts, acknowledge employee fear, and give concrete next steps so the team stays focused and trusts the transition.
Fake urgency tricks teams into burnout and erodes trust; leaders should prioritize genuine impact over manufactured pressure.
Leaders win by taking responsibility for outcomes while delegating clear accountability, building psychological safety, and using simple frameworks to balance ownership and autonomy.
A simple LinkedIn sign-in screen asking for email and password, with options to join or continue as a guest.
Most people fine-tune LLMs when they should be prompting. Try few-shot prompting first, then RAG for dynamic knowledge, and only fine-tune for domain-specific adaptation. Data quality beats technique.
Boz argues the burden of context shouldn't fall entirely on writers. At scale, managing audience access matters as much as clear writing, or everything becomes open but nobody talks.
Teams miss growth when learning is ad-hoc; treat learning like capital by scheduling regular group sessions, sharing gains, and leaders modeling the habit.
Unethical leaders reveal themselves through five observable behaviors-self-service, harmful interpersonal tactics, inciting damage, disrespecting differences, and dodging responsibility-letting you spot toxic leadership quickly.
AI-powered one-click deployment tools are eroding decades of DevOps discipline, letting unsafe code reach production and increasing risk for teams.
Effective meetings require a tight agenda, a clear facilitator, minimal length, and the right participants, turning wasteful syncs into focused decision-making for both remote and in-person teams.
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.