A carefully curated weekly newsletter for CTOs, engineering managers and technical leaders to help you learn and stay on top of technology.

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What our readers say about the newsletter?

An excellent selection of articles. Thanks!
Love the leadership building articles. No one compiles these better than you, at least in the software domain.
I loved the article about delegation, it's not said enough how important of a skill it is.

#102 — August 15, 2022

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13 Postgres tools that aren't psql (from State of PostgreSQL 2022 survey results)

We asked the PostgreSQL community: psql is by far the most popular tool for interacting with PostgreSQL, but it definitely isn't the only one. In this blog post, we look at which other tools PostgreSQL users love most.

this week's favorite

Getting Big Things Done

A while back, a colleague wanted to make a major change in the design of a system, the sort of change that was going to take a year or more, and many tens of person-years of effort. They asked me how to justify the project. This post is part of the email reply I sent. The advice is in context of technical leadership work at a big company, but perhaps it may apply elsewhere.

Reduce Friction

The topic of reducing friction exhausts me: Do people still need to be persuaded to help their developers go faster? Really? In this, the year 2022? But yes, in this, the year 2022, many teams require persuasion on this topic.

How to pick a starter project that'll make someone quit

Ever had “hiring manager’s remorse”? It’s where you regret hiring someone immediately after they start. It could be that you don’t like their face, or just want to see the world burn. Worse, they might have mentioned they like jazz. Whatever the reason, this post is here to help you make them quit on their own by picking the worst starter project for them.

Why we transitioned from Sprints to Basecamp’s “Shape Up” methodology

When experiencing team growth, things you did yesterday often won’t work for today. New problems need new solutions.

Metastability and Distributed Systems

There's no more time-honored way to get things working again, from toasters to global-scale distributed systems, than turning them off and on again. The reasons that works so well are varied, but one reason is especially important for the developers and operators of distributed systems: metastability.

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