Tech Lead Journal

“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, Tana...

“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 e...

“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 antipatter...

“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 develop...

“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....

“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 lead...

“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...

“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 b...

“Having the conversation within the business, the data science teams, and the technology teams about what problems are you trying to solve? What can AI do with the data that you have? Sometimes business comes with a lot of problems that are like science-fiction." Feng-Yuan is the co-founder and CEO of BasisAI, a Singapore-headquartered augmented intelligence software company that helps data-driven...

“The goal of your resume is to get a recruiter call. It’s a binary yes or no. That is the goal. As soon as you have your recruiter call, your resume doesn’t really matter that much." Gergely is a seasoned software engineer and engineering manager, previously worked in hypergrowth companies such as Uber, Skyscanner, and Skype. He is the author of “The Tech Resume Inside Out” book and “The Pragmatic...

“Organizations should never set up a central digital transformation office. It should be owned by everybody in the organization. It’s not a CIO’s job. It’s the CEO’s job." Richard Koh is the CTO of Microsoft Singapore who played a major part in the Office 365 founding team. In this episode, I had an inspiring discussion with him around his journey founding the Office 365, the challenges he faced,...

“Goal on the behaviors that matter. Don’t goal on your vanity metrics. Figure out what it is that, not just works for your product, but also for you as an individual." Crystal Widjaja is a startup growth advisor and a Forbes 30 Under 30. She was most recently the SVP of Business Intelligence and Growth for Gojek. She is also the co-founder of Generation Girl, a non-profit organization that introdu...

“You can run an organization where you communicate clearly, and you treat people fairly, and you try to set people up for success. I have seen it work, and I can make that happen, and I remember that it is possible." Hongyi is the Director of Open Government Products, a division of the Government Technology Agency of Singapore. He leads an experimental team of engineers, designers, and product man...

“Courage needs to be emphasized even more in software development context. That’s related with respect. We cannot expect the developers will be courageous, to tell the truth, to have integrity, unless the organization, the management respect them as a professional." Joshua initially started his career as a software developer, but over time became more interested in the people aspect of software de...

“As a leader, it’s not your responsibility to do. It’s your responsibility to teach and help your team to level up. Your job is to level up your team, so that you have a team of people who can do it better and faster." Trisha Gee is a Java Champion, author, and the leader of Java Developer Advocacy team at JetBrains. She has an extensive Java experience with expertise in Java high performance syst...

“A Tech Lead is a person with a technical background, typically an engineer who is leading a team and particularly responsible and accountable for their technical direction." Patrick Kua is a seasoned technology leader and is passionate about accelerating the growth and success of tech organizations and technical leaders. Before going independent recently, Pat was the CTO and Chief Scientist of N2...

“There is no permanent failure and there is no guarantee of success either. What you define as success, what you define as failure is just a definition." Sau Sheong is the CEO of SP Digital, an energytech company, part of SP Group, the leading energy utility in Asia Pacific and one of Singapore’s largest corporations. In this episode, Sau Sheong shared with me about the digital transformation jour...

“Continuous Integration is when you are integrating with the other developers on the code base as soon as possible. Continuous Delivery is when your code is in a deployable state and functionally correct." In this episode, I had a long deep conversation with Sriram Narayanan (Ram for short), a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks Singapore. Ram is one of my mentors and someone that I always enjoy...

“The thing about becoming a Tech Influencer is, content is Queen and consistency, quality and value matter. That’s the trifecta of creating content that sticks." In this episode, I had a fun conversation with Stephanie Wong, a Developer Advocate from Google Cloud. Stephanie is well known for her online developer contents ranging from YouTube videos, podcast and blog posts. She also hosts her own Y...

"With Infrastructure as Code, you’re not trying to kind of reverse engineer or understand what ended up somehow onto each system, you’re actually saying, this is how the system is built and because it’s built from that code. So there is no difference." In this episode, I had an in-depth discussion with Kief Morris, the author of the O’Reilly “Infrastructure as Code” book. We started from what is I...

"With the kind of security breaches and attacks that we are witnessing in this era, it becomes of prior importance that we prioritize security at the top." In this episode, I am joined by Neha Malhotra who has recently been awarded one of the Top 20 Women in Cybersecurity in Singapore 2020. Neha is deeply passionate about cybersecurity and has an extensive experience in driving initiatives across...

“Knowing and understanding are very different things. Unless I practice it along with good guidance, I may not increase my understanding." There are several Agile misconceptions in the industry lately. It has even come to a point where people are being skeptical and starting to doubt the actual value of Agile methodologies and practices. In this episode, I had a conversation with Stanly Lau, one o...

Hear from Singapore's prominent community builder, Michael Cheng, on how to contribute to communities, and learn more about his latest passion for mentoring junior developers. _____ “Rather than being passive about it, why don’t I take a proactive approach to try and find people who are like-minded, who share the same ideals and goals and let them come together and just share." Michael Cheng has b...

"Leading others is leading yourself first. That's a very big work of self awareness, and you should always do that." Jerome Poudevigne is a serial CTO who has co-founded multiple startups with multiple successful exits. Recently, he has been working at Google Cloud and AWS to help startups grow and make the most of cloud technologies. In this very first episode of Tech Lead Journal, Jerome shares...

"Great technical leadership requires more than just great coding skills. It requires a variety of other skills that are not well-defined." In this trailer episode, your host Henry Suryawirawan explains why he created this brand new podcast and what you can expect and learn from it. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback . Follow @techleadjournal on Linke...