CTO Insights - Issue #134
CTO Insights - Issue #134
Software Engineering and Technical Leadership
Welcome to CTO Insights #134!
This newsletter delivers top-notch Software Engineering and Technical Leadership content, making your weekly reading more insightful and enjoyable.
This week’s favorite - How to Do Great Work and How to Scale Yourself Down — Not Up — as a Leader.
CTO Insights is community-driven and thrives on your input. If you find value in what you read, I encourage you to share it with your friends in tech and your wider community, whether via social media, slack, teams, or any other channel you frequent.
Together, we can make every edition of CTO Insights a wealth of knowledge for all!
Featured
Adeva is a global talent network that connects companies with the world's top talent, enabling them to scale efficiently and innovate faster.
Founded by engineers, Adeva offers flexible, cost-effective, and scalable talent solutions for companies to grow effortlessly, cut hiring costs, and deliver projects faster.
Sign up today and discover why over 200 growing companies and enterprises consistently choose Adeva for hiring their tech and product talent.
Architecture
Pfizer’s Serverless Architecture to Scale Processing of Biomarkers
This article discusses a data processing pipeline developed by Pfizer's team for analyzing digital biomarker data from wrist sensors. The pipeline is designed for scalability, reproducibility, and handling of diverse data sources and algorithms.
The article provides a detailed walkthrough of the system architecture and setup, helping you understand how such a pipeline can maintain data provenance, offer flexibility, and allow for the efficient processing of large datasets, thereby saving significant company resources.
Scalability
Measuring Performance for iOS Apps at Uber Scale
This article provides an insightful journey into Uber's methodology for measuring app performance. You'll gain a detailed understanding of startup latency measurements, how to adjust for iOS 15's pre-warming, and the fusion of Apple's MetricKit and custom measurements for optimal performance.
Essential reading for anyone seeking to enhance their own app's performance.
Culture
How to Do Great Work
This is an epic article by Paul Gram that provides a method for achieving greatness in any field, stressing the importance of passion, curiosity, and ambition. It underscores the importance of self-discovery and the pursuit of exciting work, emphasizing that while hard work is essential, working smart is equally crucial. It also offers practical advice on navigating through different work phases and handling potential hurdles.
Leadership
How to Scale Yourself Down — Not Up — as a Leader
In March 2022, James Everingham, after leading engineering teams of thousands at Instagram and Meta, co-founded a venture with a team of 12.
He discusses the challenges of shifting from leading large organizations to small startups, likening it to moving from fifth gear to first. With large organizations requiring delegation and risk reduction, startups demand leaders be comfortable with ambiguity, risk-taking, and wearing multiple hats. Everingham provides advice on avoiding common pitfalls, such as over-planning for success and overhiring, and emphasizes the importance of balancing process and adaptability.
Product
Product leadership in a chaotic world: Balancing short-term and long-term goals
Dave Martin warns startups against short-term decisions driven by immediate revenue needs, such as writing "Closing Code" to close individual deals. These practices, while giving instant relief, lead to high costs, delayed strategic initiatives, and tech debt, hindering long-term growth and scalability. He advises product leaders to prioritize a clear product vision and strategy, ensure transparency in development costs, and manage their roadmaps effectively.
Other
The Importance of Being a Code Reviewer
This article provides an in-depth look into the benefits of code review and proposes the W3H framework - a guide on 'why', 'what', 'when', and 'how' to approach reviews.
From fostering team cohesion to enhancing personal skills and network, code review serves multiple purposes.
Build your own open-source ChatGPT-style chatbot
Mozilla is developing a trustworthy AI chatbot using open-source large language models, ensuring transparency, privacy, and fairness.
This post outlines our journey and challenges and provides a concise, end-to-end guide on creating a chatbot with open-source tools, encouraging innovation without relying on dominant tech firms.
How platform teams get stuff done
Platform teams have a unique reliance on other teams to ensure adoption of their platform - getting code changes into other teams' codebase is critical to their success. There are a variety of patterns for that cross-team collaboration, and selecting the right ones depends on both the phase of platform adoption and the ability of both teams and codebases to accept external influence.
Closing Notes
Thanks for making it this far! 🙏
I hope you enjoyed this week’s issue. Use the thumbs up/down buttons to rate and don’t forget to share the newsletter with fellows.