Tech Lead Journal

🎙️ CELEBRATE the 100th EPISODE by submitting your story/message at techleadjournal.dev/celebrate-100 🎉 “Acceptance test is any test that a system must pass in order to be accepted. If you can’t ship a system without passing a test, then it is an acceptance test." Kenneth Pugh is an acclaimed author and thought leader in acceptance-test driven development (ATDD) and behavior-driven development (BD...

“Empiricism is at the heart of agility. The fundamental foundation of agility starts with some assertion about value. Every sprint or iteration is really an experiment about value." Kurt Bittner is the author and editor of many books on agile product development, including co-authoring the recent “Professional Agile Leader” book. In this episode, we started our conversation discussing the common m...

“A highly functional team defines the right environment and has what they need to be the best professionals they can be. And that always includes agency and psychological safety." Jim Benson is the co-author of “Personal Kanban” and is currently working on his upcoming book “The Collaboration Equation”. In this episode, we started by discussing Personal Kanban, how it differs from a to-do list, an...

“Reliability is the most important thing. Your users define your reliability, so make sure you’re measuring the right thing. And 100% is out of the question, so pick the right target." Alex Hidalgo is the Principal Reliability Advocate at Nobl9 and author of “Implementing Service Level Objectives”. In this episode, we discussed the practical guide on how to implement SRE and SLOs. Alex started by...

“You are your greatest asset in your career and in your life. Invest in you personally in all areas of life in order to live your best life." Jeff Perry is an engineering coach, the founder of More Than Engineering and the co-host of the Engineering Career Coach podcast. In this episode, Jeff shared the important role of a coach or mentor in our engineering career. We first discussed Jeff’s engine...

“An engineering manager should make sure that the team has a good balance of delivering things that the business needs with enough capacity to do it sustainably over time." Patrick Kua is a seasoned technology leader with a passion to accelerate the growth and success of tech organisations and technical leaders. In this episode, we discussed Pat’s latest course, Engineering Manager Essentials, whi...

“We want to write as little software as possible, and we want it to have as much value as possible. If you actually focus on that, it means you have to be close to your customer." Dave Thomas is the founder & chairman of Bedarra Corp, creator of IBM Smalltalk, VisualAge for Java, Eclipse, Kx Analyst workbench and Skills Matter YOW! Australia conferences. In this episode, Dave shared about his pers...

“Testing is an activity that happens throughout. It is not a phase that happens at the end. Start thinking about the risks at the very beginning, and how we are going to mitigate those with testing." Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin are the co-authors of several books on Agile Testing and the co-founders of Agile Testing Fellowship. In this episode, Janet and Lisa shared the agile testing concept an...

"Pull, don’t push. Don’t tell people what to do. Tell them what results you want and let them figure out how best to achieve the outcome that’s needed." Mary & Tom Poppendieck are the co-authors of several books related to Agile and Lean, including their award-winning book “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit” published in 2003. In this episode, Mary & Tom shared about lean softwar...

“The simplest way to describe craftsmanship is pride of workmanship. It is the mindset that you are working on something important and you are going to do it well." Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob) is the co-founder of cleancoders.com, an acclaimed speaker at conferences worldwide, and prolific author of multiple best-selling books. In this episode, Uncle Bob shared some insights from his latest b...

“The goal of software is often to sustain an organization. An organization invests in software in order to achieve some goal and hopefully to sustain itself in helping it achieve that goal." Mark Seemann is an acclaimed author, international speaker, and a highly experienced developer. In this episode, Mark shared some insights from his latest book, “Code That Fits in Your Head”, on how to write s...

“Observability is a technique for ensuring that you can understand novel problems in your system. Can you understand what’s happening in your system and why, without having to push a new code by slicing and dicing existing telemetry signals that are coming out of your system?" Liz Fong-Jones is the co-author of the “Observability Engineering” book and a Principal Developer Advocate for SRE and Obs...

“You don’t know what you don’t know. So when you’re learning something, it’s very hard to identify your own knowledge gaps, especially if you’re a programmer and you’re moving from one language to another." Jeremy Walker is the co-founder of Exercism and Kaido. In this episode, Jeremy first shared about Exercism, a not-for-profit online platform for learning different programming languages. He exp...

“We need to consider our system that we built as sociotechnical systems. The system is more than the sum of its parts. It’s a product of their interactions. We need to focus on improving the performance of the whole, instead of separate parts of the system." Susanne Kaiser is the author of the upcoming book “Adaptive Systems with Domain-Driven Design, Wardley Mapping, and Team Topologies: Architec...

“Today, employees want more autonomy, e.g. work-life balance and working from home, and at the same time, they want more social inclusion to get as many authentic insights into the company and the new job as possible." Jens Olberding is the author of “Agile Recruiting” and an expert in agile HR management. In this episode, we opened our conversation discussing the great resignation trend and its u...

“The route of becoming a technical leader is helping others up-skill and grow. Once you learn that helping others grow is your objective, then you become a leader." Laurențiu Spilcă is a development lead and trainer at Endava. He is an author of multiple books and a frequent coding livestreamer on YouTube. In this episode, Laurențiu shared his experience as a developer consultant and provided his...

“Treating everyone as remote is to keep everyone in mind as having the same level, same equality, the same access to information in communication exchanges between people." James Stanier is the author of “Effective Remote Work” and Director of Engineering at Shopify. In this episode, James shared insights from his latest book and began by sharing why remote work is here to stay and the basic setup...

“There’s a substantial difference between building software and then building software for production and then building software for scale." Mohammed Alabsi is a seasoned technology leader, an angel investor, and a venture fellow at Insignia Ventures. Mohammed worked at Amazon for 10 years, before moving to Southeast Asia and helped scale up Bukalapak towards its IPO. In this episode, Mohammed sta...

“Architecture is context. You can only make the right trade-offs between alternatives if you know the context drivers." Eltjo Poort is the architecture practice lead at CGI Netherlands with over 30 years of experience in the software industry. In this episode, Eltjo started by explaining the importance of architecture context and business drivers that can help an architect understand the different...

“Focus on what really matters. If everything matters, then nothing matters. Make sure that what you do is aligned with what really matters." Peter Stevens and Maria Matarelli are the co-founders of the Personal Agility Institute and the authors of the “Personal Agility”. In this episode, Peter and Maria shared what Personal Agility System is and how we can apply this framework in our daily lives....

“It is good to improve your processes to make them faster and more efficient. But sometimes what’s even more important is doing the right thing in the first place." Scott Wlaschin is the author of “Domain Modeling Made Functional” and the popular F# site fsharpforfunandprofit.com. In this episode, Scott began by sharing his view of the need for developers today to become more polyglot developers a...

“Oftentimes it’s not about what’s being said. It’s the fact that there’s not a shared understanding of what’s being said. It’s important that organizations proactively think about how they build a common language and manage that." Jonathon Hensley is the co-founder and CEO of EMERGE, a digital product consulting firm, and the author of “Alignment: Overcoming internal sabotage and digital product f...

“We want to create organizations that can surprise us and do things beyond what we’ve designed them to do, rather than a machine, which only operates in the box that you’ve designed." Jardena London is a business transformation consultant and the author of “Cultivating Transformations”. In this episode, Jardena shared insights from her book on transformational leadership and how one can become a b...

“Interactions with domain experts play a key role in implementing software. You have to make sure that you understand the problem you’re solving. You cannot provide a software solution without understanding the problem first." Vladik Khononov is the author of “Learning Domain-Driven Design”. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Vlad started by sharing why und...

“It’s great if developers have understanding about the domain, because then they can propose better solutions, that’s not necessarily the same solution that the users have in mind, which are often limited by what they know." Stefan Hofer is the co-author of Domain Storytelling–a collaborative, visual and agile way to build domain-driven software. In this episode, Stefan shared the story of how he...