The Unwritten Laws of Engineering

The Unwritten Laws of Engineering - CTO Academy

One of my favourite business and engineering books is probably one you’ve never heard of – The Unwritten Laws of Engineering by W.J. King.  Originally published in 1944 as three articles in Mechanical Engineering Magazine, the flagship publication of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). There is likely to be little in this book … Read more

The Hiring Conundrum : Promote vs. Recruit

The Hiring Conundrum: Promoting or Hiring from the CTO Perspective

The business is going gangbusters. The team is starting to creak under increasing pressure. The CEO is demanding quick hires to plug the gaps. What to do? Recruit internally and know what you’re getting or, hire externally to find the right expertise but potentially disrupt team cohesion? Internal Promotion If you’re growing quickly, you will … Read more

What a CTO needs to consider, When choosing a technology stack

What a CTO needs to consider, when choosing a technology stack

When I was a developer, I always wanted to use the latest language and framework. I would accept the foibles of the framework, just because it was new and cool. Spend hours setting it up, installing all the different components, writing a simple application and then deploying at the click of a button …. only to spend hours in the server backends, trying to understand why it did not work!  I’d then get a exciting new job using the framework, and be immediately lauded as the star developer, which in truth became more like first line support.

As CTO, you should always be super aware of trends, but very weary about jumping straight in. Can you afford to lose man days, whilst the team gets it head around new technology. They might be having fun, but you’re getting nothing done and that costs money.

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