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January 17 · Issue #22 · View online
Weekly Readings on Software Engineering & Technical Leadership.
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Welcome to CTO Insights #22! The newsletter is broadly based on top engineering and leadership content from the past week, it is free and made for your weekend reading.
Click here and subscribe if you want it in your inbox every Sunday morning.
Special thanks this week to: Frederico Castro, Mephi Liu, and Katerina Trajchevska for their support for last week’s newsletter - vital to keeping it going for everyone else to read!
How can you help? Share CTO Insights with your network or someone you feel will benefit from it - it’s the best way to keep the community growing. Ready? Let’s talk software, technology, and leadership.
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The Journey to 7X Search Performance Improvement
Deepak Mehta from Egnyte’s engineering team shares the frustrating, yet successful, journey into reducing their system’s search response time. From cluster upgrade, through removing unused functionalities to improvements in indexing. Read more about how they managed to drop the response time from 14 to 2 seconds. Check out their journey (supported with graphs and stats).
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Why Is the Google Cloud UI So Slow (And How to Fix It)?
According to Debug Bear’s recent test, opening a page in Google’s Cloud Console is taking more time than it should. This article will take a closer look at the page load process of the Google Cloud Functions page, and examine how it could be sped up. They not only analyzed the process but they also put together directions on how Google Cloud’s load process can be sped up. If you are interested in JS performance, you’d love this story.
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The Forgotten Dimension of Diversity
This is a compelling Harvard Business Review study on the problems with social class disadvantage. U.S. workers from lower social-class origins are 32% less likely to become managers than people from higher social-class origins. Paul Ingram (Kravis Professor of Business at Columbia Business School), estimates that if the problem were to be resolved, the supply of capable manages would be 3x as high.
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A CTO’s Guide to Developing Leaders
Developing leaders is both art and science. This a great story for any CTO who is willing to learn and understand the process of developing leaders. The best engineers don’t always make the best managers.
Andy Skipper (the author) maps out all of the stages of finding and shaping potential leaders. It’s all about environment, opportunity, support, and learning/teaching.
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Building On-Call Culture at GitHub
GitHub admits that it was finally time to improve their on-call culture in order to provide a better experience for their customers. The on-call rotation was large and engineers were on-call for 24 hours at a time. The monitoring and documentation were not well maintained. As a result, we had noisy alerts and poor runbooks. This story is an edition of their “Building GitHub” blog series, showing you another story of the necessary steps it took to improve GitHub once again.
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The ‘Arctic Fox’ Model of Software Delivery
Xero’s CTO explains his unique method of building simplicity in any workspace. Using his “Arctic Fox” method, he and his team have been able to live comfortably through scaling Xero. In my time at Xero, this scaling has been relentless — we’ve gone from 10 teams to 14, 22, 36, 60 and now over 100. I bet you’re wondering why it’s called the Arctic Fox. That, like all of the necessary steps, can be discovered here. |
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No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees! No pressure!
Freedom over growth, sustainability over speed, life over work! Sahil shares his story about the ups and downs he had on his journey when building his startup and how getting back to a one-person company helped him achieve 85% growth year-over-year. Their way of working may have been once unimaginable, but now it seems to be thriving. Check out the full story. |
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How Apps Like Robinhood, Venmo, and Cash App Are Helping Disrupt Traditional Banks
CB Insights reveals a stunning report on how certain tech companies are disrupting traditional banks. Bank of America, for one, saw profits drop 16% year-over-year in Q3’20 to $4.9B. 😨 The report examines dozens of companies like Venmo, Robinhood, TransferWise, and more. Check out how they affect the world by chipping away the traditional banks’ market share.
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Open Source Has a Funding Problem
James Turner from Stack Overflow wrote an incredible story about open source and its fundamental issue - Open source is not about free software, it is about freedom of software. He talks about why funding open source is so difficult, who should contribute most to funding, and what are the biggest issues. Relying on volunteers to maintain every open source project isn’t long term sustainable. He is closing the story with a personal view about how open source can become truly sustainable.
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Enterprise AI Stage
An exclusive event on the latest AI applications enabled via deep learning. If you are exploring AI and its potential to transform the enterprise, I’m sure you’d enjoy the event. Jan, 28 - 29 - Online
Pass - $199
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