| CTO ACADEMY That Friday Feeling Again Welcome again to the “5 Minute Tech Break”, hope you had a terrific week. This week we welcome back our resident Accidental CTO blogger, reflect on a presentation with the school of code and curate you through some interesting articles on Managerial Challenges, Agility Leadership Styles and Soft Skills for Developers. Until next time, have a great and relaxing weekend. Andrew Weaver [email protected] |
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| RETURN OF THE ACCIDENTAL CTO “From Team Member to Team Manager” This week we welcomed Mostafa Khattab back to our blog with the latest chapter from his series of articles on becoming an Accidental CTO. “I’ve mentioned in previous articles that arriving unexpectedly into this senior role led to challenges that were very different to those I faced as a team member and brought with them many uncertainties and “unknowns”. As technologists we don’t generally like the unexpected, we like order, some certainty and mostly “knowns” – at least that was the place I was coming from … “ You can read the full article from Mostafa here. |
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| TECH LEADERS OF THE FUTURE One afternoon at The School of Code The School of Code is a UK based bootcamp that helps people make career changes into tech. Alongside my colleague and senior leadership coach Sanjay Mistry, we recently delivered a one hour Q&A presentation to 50+ members of their latest cohort as they head off into a career in tech. We talked about career road maps, CTO expectations and what’s needed to become an effective leader. It was a really engaged, motivated crowd and a very nice step outside the norm for Sanjay and I. You can read more about the event and the school here. |
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| NEWS & VIEWS Other Articles Catching Our Eye This Week This Week in Programming: Go Approves Generics, at Long Last…Golang team member Ian Lance Taylor writes that generics have been “one of the most commonly requested language features” since the Go programming language was first released in 2009, but even then, it’s adoption doesn’t come without concerns. Being able to write reusable code excites some developers and has been behind the push all along. Unity CFO Kim Jabal interview: Understanding the Trade-Off between Market Share and Profits… Unity Technologies recently reported better than expected earnings for the fourth quarter ended December 31, and overall, Unity has benefited from the enthusiasm for games during the pandemic as players try to distract themselves from reality during lockdown. Their mission is to turn everybody into game developers, and that’s where it has been investing a lot of its resources. Game On! First it was Agile software development, now Agile management is remaking the workplace…The traditional command-and-control leadership style has fallen out of fashion and a new trend for Agile management has come to the fore. This flexible form of leadership, which involves the application of the principles of Agile software development to management tasks, relies on decentralised decision-making. Agile management has proven to be a good fit for our socially distanced times, where geographically disparate leaders and their teams must respond rapidly to fast-changing circumstances. Why You Need Soft Skills as a Software Developer – And How to Improve Them…As much as code quality, technical skills, and other ‘hard’ aspects of engineering matter, communication and collaboration are what really make a sound engineer great at what they do. What we need to realize is that soft skills are just like any other skill out there. You have to practice them regularly if you want them to improve, and it might take some time before they become second nature. The roles and responsibilities of a startup CEO and its founding team…Being a startup CEO means being a lot of things; believing in your team, maintaining a clear direction for the company, fostering a culture of team cohesiveness are only a couple of what’s on your shoulders. While you should be willing to do anything and everything called upon you, being a startup CEO means knowing that you don’t have to do everything, and knowing how to prioritize and delegate tasks effectively. |
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| BOOK OF THE WEEK The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way A slight change of direction with this weeks book of the week and From Here to There. How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? Come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we’ve never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted, but it’s also critical to our species’s evolutionary success. Writer Michael Bond covers the subject of mental navigation in this fascinating study and explains why people don’t get lost more often, how brains makes “cognitive maps,” and how an “understanding of the world around us affects our psychology and behaviour.” “At the heart of this book is a detailed account of the neuroscience of navigation. It is fascinating… Ultimately, ‘we are spatial beings’ and skilfully and at times movingly makes the case for how deeply that is true.” — The Sunday Times |
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| VIDEO OF THE WEEK How to Completely Pivot a Business | Simon Sinek |
 “Greatness is not this wonderful, esoteric, ellusive, god-like feature that only the special among us will ever taste. It’s something that truly exists in all of us.” |
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