Tech Lead Journal

“Kanban is a flow strategy that helps you to optimize the flow of value through your value streams from ideation to customer." Dimitar Karaivanov is a Lean-thinker, a Kanban practitioner, and the CEO and co-founder of Kanbanize. In this episode, Dimitar shared his story on how he got fascinated by the simplicity and the effectiveness of Kanban, which then led him to start Kanbanize. He shared in-d...

“A lot of engineers are unhappy and a lot of that has to do with not being able to control their environment, or even articulate what they want to have changed in the environment. By becoming a better communicator, you will also become happier." Chris Laffra is an experienced and talented software engineer having worked in companies such as IBM, Google, and Uber. His wide variety of experiences en...

“Micro-frontends are representations of business subdomains. We should differentiate them from components, because components are solving technical problems. Micro-frontends are looking from the product side on how you can create value in isolation for your users." Luca Mezzalira is a Principal Architect at AWS, an expert on micro-frontends, and the author of the upcoming “Building Micro-Frontends...

“Business agility is a set of organizational capabilities, behaviors, and ways of working that afford your business the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose, no matter what the future brings." Evan Leybourn is the founder and CEO of Business Agility Institute. In this episode, Evan shared about the current maturity of agile adoption and how agile has matured over the years b...

“A lot of us in clinical practice always thought of technology as a tool. Today, technology has become not just a “what”, but it’s become a “how”. That means how you practice medicine can be enabled through technology itself." Dr. Yong Chern Chet is the founding COO of a Southeast Asian region early stage digital health start-up headquartered in Singapore with a simple mission of enabling “Better...

“Practices and principles are necessary and useful, but they should be informed by what the constraints are in the first place. We need to acknowledge the constraints, and then build and decide on practices and principles based on that." Manuel Pais is the co-author of “Team Topologies” and a DevOps thought leader, focusing on team interactions, delivery practices, and accelerating flow. In this e...

“Hybrid work is here to stay. It is going to continue. But we want to make sure that it comes in a way that’s equitable and everyone gets to experience the benefits of it." Dr. Jenna Butler is a Visiting Research Fellow at Microsoft Research in the Productivity and Intelligence Team. She is also an adjunct Professor at Bellevue College in radiation therapy. In this episode, Dr. Jenna shared about...

“Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on the system in order to increase your confidence that the system will survive difficult conditions." Mikołaj Pawlikowski is an engineering lead at Bloomberg and the author of “Chaos Engineering: Site reliability through controlled disruption“. In this episode, Miko shared about what chaos engineering is, including clarifications on some of th...

“Back when work from home became suddenly virtually overnight, it was all about enabling the business to continue. A lot of this move was rushed out of necessity, but the focus was on speed. The focus was not on security. And security took a backseat." Tony Jarvis is a CISO advisor and cybersecurity strategist who has advised Fortune 500 clients across the world and served as a thought leader with...

“By and large, the way people put together the delivery process is by gut and instinct. The next step up from there is to use the data that comes out of your system to help you make the right decisions. When I say data-driven DevOps, don’t rely on this human experience, and let the system tell you. We should be able to find that kind of information from data." Kohsuke Kawaguchi is widely known as...

“Technology is really impacting our daily life, sometimes without us knowing, and it’s important that we start understanding or relearning what is ABCDEFG. In the future of business, or future of work, there are many use cases of technology that are non-traditional, non-techie people need to learn and know how to use them." Jim Lim is the founder of the socio-techno network 59stVentures, the healt...

“Tech Capital is about creating something that enables things that weren’t possible before, that genuinely helps the business and enables other people in your organization, and those are the kind of stuffs that eventually end up paying long term." Aviv Ben-Yosef is an advisor and consultant for tech executives to help them create world-class engineering teams. In this episode, Aviv shared with me...

“Lean Inception is about aligning a group of people to be successful. It’s about aligning the vision and the MVP from three different angles: the business, the users, and the engineers, so they align and decide what is the very first step." Paulo Caroli is a Principal consultant at Thoughtworks, co-founder of Agile Brazil, and the author of the best-seller Lean Inception and the recent FunRetrospe...

“A high-performing team is one that gets to spend almost all of their time solving interesting problems that move the business forward. Not doing a lot of toil. Not working on things they have to do in order to get to the things they want to do." Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, the observability tools for engineering teams to debug production systems faster and smarter. In t...

“One of the technological opportunities that we have taken during the pandemic has been transforming the mindset to thinking on products, to thinking on platforms. And I think that’s the foundations of the super app." Pablo Sanz is the CTO of AirAsia. In this episode, Pablo shared with me the tough challenges that AirAsia had to go through during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and how it has to piv...

“Developer productivity is not lines of code written. It’s not the number of commits. It has to do with the ultimate problem you’re solving and the users that you’re solving it for." Beyang Liu is the CTO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, a developer tools company that brings universal code search capability for developers. In this episode, Beyang shared with me his perspective about developers’ prod...

“Simplicity is an experience that makes things easy for users that leaves positive emotions." Jin Kang Møller is an award-winning customer experience strategist, design practitioner, and the author of “The Simplicity Playbook for Innovators“. She was the driving force behind FRANK by OCBC and OCBC OneWealth app that won her a Singapore Good Design Mark Gold award in 2017. In this episode, Jin shar...

“The CIO is a person who uses IT to facilitate and enable a company so that it becomes more competitive, and it becomes more profitable." Alex Siow is currently a Professor in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Director of NUS’s Advanced Computing for Executives. With a career that spans over four decades, Alex Siow is well-known as Singapore’s first CIO in t...

“Your digital agenda is your business agenda. You got to be very deliberate and intentional about your transformation journey. You do it because it’s the right thing to do, and you got to figure out what is that right thing for your organization." Johnny Wijaya is the Head of Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon APAC Innovation Center. In this episode, we learn from Johnny the sustainable innovation stor...

“Be the supply to the unmet demand. Things that you could make a huge difference on if only you just go and do it. You don’t need to seek permission. That’s how you end up growing and being noticed." Annie Vella is a technologist with almost two decades of hands-on software engineering and technology leadership experience. In this episode, Annie shared her engineering career dilemma story, why she...

“If a user is even reading documentation that a technical writer has produced, they’re probably already annoyed." Helen Scott is a technical writer and Java Developer Advocate at JetBrains. In this episode, we discussed many things about technical writing, such as the technical writer role definition, the traits of a good technical writer, and how to create a good technical content, including a fe...

“The output of a manager is the output of the manager’s team plus the output of the organization that they influence." James Stanier is the SVP Engineering at Brandwatch and author of “Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager”. In this episode, we explored on how one can become an effective software engineering manager and how to build and run effective engineering teams. We started off by...

“I truly believe that what set the superstars or people who are very successful is the ability to tell to themselves to quit. Winners quit fast and quit without guilt." Doron Shachar is an Israeli entrepreneur living in Vietnam over the past 12 years and the founder & CEO of Renova Cloud, an AWS and GCP Consulting Partner in Vietnam. In this episode, we looked at the essence of Israeli entrepr...

"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 g...

“When I think about well-crafted software, it’s code that we are not scared to change. The code clearly specifies what it does. When we change one part of it, don’t break the other. You always feel that you are in control. You are controlling the code, not the other way around." Sandro Mancuso is the author of “The Software Craftsman” and co-founder of Codurance. In this episode, Sandro shared his...