/images/TechLeadJournal.png

By Henry Suryawirawan

Great technical leadership requires more than just great coding skills. It requires a variety of other skills that are not well-defined, and they are not something that we can fully learn in any school or book. Hear from experienced technical leaders sharing their journey and philosophy for building great technical teams and achieving technical excellence. Find out what makes them great and how to apply those lessons to your work and team.

Buy me a coffee

#64 - Principles for Designing Successful Web APIs - James Higginbotham

James Higginbotham is the author of “Principles of Web API Design”. In this episode, James explained why it is extremely important to design APIs properly and shared the five key important principles of API design. He also recommended the API Design-First approach using the ADDR process.

#63 - Being an Effective Generalist & Building Good Developer Experience - Deepu K Sasidharan

Deepu K Sasidharan is a polyglot developer and a Senior Developer Advocate for DevOps at Okta. In this episode, Deepu shared the importance of being a polyglot and generalist developer, his tips for learning new stuffs, why interview practices should be improved, and how to build a good developer experience.

#62 - You're Never Coding Alone, How to Be a Good Team Coder - Fernando Doglio

Fernando Doglio is the author of “Skills of a Software Developer”. In this episode, Fernando shared tips on how to be a successful software developer that includes how to work well within a team, avoiding over-engineering and early optimization, succeeding in technical interviews, and writing technical books.

#61 - The Programmer's Brain and the Importance of Cognition - Felienne Hermans

Felienne Hermans is the author of “The Programmer’s Brain” and an Associate Professor at Leiden University. In this episode, Felienne explained why programming is one of the most demanding cognitive activities, the 3 different cognitive processes, and how to get good at reading code and naming things.

#60 - Software Tradeoffs and How to Make Good Programming Decisions - Tomasz Lelek

Tomasz Lelek is the author of “Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs”. In this episode, Tomasz gave advice on how software developers should approach the potential software mistakes and explained some typical trade-offs when making software engineering design decisions.

#59 - DevOps Solutions to Operations Anti-Patterns - Jeffery Smith

Jeffery Smith is the author of “Operations Anti-Patterns, DevOps Solutions”. In this episode, Jeffery described DevOps essentials and explained the CAMS DevOps framework. We also discussed three anti-patterns taken from his book: paternalist syndrome, alert fatigue, and wasting perfectly good incident.

#58 - Principles for Writing Valuable Unit Tests - Vladimir Khorikov

Vladimir Khorikov is the author of “Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns”. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about unit testing, its four pillars, the anatomy of a good unit test, anti-patterns, and other topics such as test-driven development, code coverage, and test mocks.

#57 - Observing Your Production Systems and Yourself - Jamie Riedesel

Jamie Riedesel is a Staff Engineer at Dropbox and the author of “Software Telemetry”. In this episode, Jamie explained software telemetry and the importance of understanding how our production systems behave. She also shared her experience dealing with toxic work environments and how to cope with it.

#56 - Refactoring–The Discipline for Writing Good Code - Christian Clausen

Christian Clausen is a Technical Agile Coach and the author of “Five Lines of Code”. In this episode, Christian explained in-depth about refactoring, when and how we should do refactoring, important architectural refactoring, and a few tips for writing quality software.

#55 - It's Time to Own Your Tech Career - Don Jones

Don Jones is the author of “Own Your Tech Career”. In this episode, Don explained why it is important for us to understand the career we want and aim to build that career deliberately, instead of winding up in a rat race. He also shared a few important tips and advice as part of owning our career.