“The people who are the communicators are the ones visible within companies. Just being technically proficient is not enough. You have to be an advocate for yourself." Neil Thompson is the founder of Teach the Geek and a public speaking coach. In this episode, Neil explained the importance of public speaking for technical professionals. Neil shared tips and advice on we can start and improve our public speaking skills. We also discussed some common challenges when speaking publicly and tips on h...
Oct 31, 2022•40 min•Ep. 111
“As a team leader, you will become more successful and valuable if you are no longer a bottleneck for the people who are working with you and under you." Roy Osherove is the author of “Elastic Leadership” and “The Art of Unit Testing”. In this episode, we discussed leadership insights from “Elastic Leadership”. Roy first shared how he came up with the concept and described what elastic leadership is. He explained the different leadership styles based on the 3 team phases (survival mode, learning...
Oct 24, 2022•56 min•Ep. 110
“The most responsible thing a human can do, either personally for their own development or the development of others, is play to a person’s strengths." Brandon Miller is the founder and CEO of 34 Strong and one of the first 7 certified Gallup Clifton StrengthsFinder coaches in the world. In this episode, we discussed Clifton StrengthsFinder, also known as CliftonStrengths. Brandon introduced what CliftonStrengths is and why it is important for us to recognize and focus on our strengths. He also ...
Oct 17, 2022•48 min•Ep. 109
“Companies that are successful in getting the most out of the cloud embrace the fact that distributed application architecture is a first class application architecture concern." Joe Duffy is the co-founder and CEO of Pulumi. In this episode, we discussed cloud engineering concept and how Pulumi is helping to shape its future. Joe started by sharing his story founding Pulumi and the evolution of the cloud adoption. He shared his view on why cloud should be a first class application architecture ...
Oct 10, 2022•50 min•Ep. 108
“If you want to unlock the value of your data by generating data-driven values, and you want to do it reliably and resiliently at scale, then you need to consider data mesh." Zhamak Dehghani is the author of the “Data Mesh” book. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about the data mesh, a concept she founded in 2018, which has then been becoming an industry trend. We started our conversation by discussing the current challenges working with data, such as the data centralization approach and wh...
Oct 03, 2022•57 min•Ep. 107
“There’s no leading without following. We are only a leader because somebody is following us." Jutta Eckstein is a coach, consultant, and trainer who has helped many teams and organizations worldwide making an Agile transition. In this episode, we discussed ideas from her book “Company-wide Agility With Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, and Sociocracy”, also widely known as the BOSSA nova. Jutta started by sharing today’s company challenge in terms of collision of values between shareholder, custome...
Sep 26, 2022•57 min•Ep. 106
“If you want to become a better and more effective leader, then one of your core skills should be coaching skills." Bob Galen is the President & Principal Agile Coach at RGCG and a prolific writer, blogger, and podcaster. In this episode, Bob and I discussed coaching and leadership from his latest book “Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching”. Bob started by explaining the concepts of agile leadership and agile coaching. He shared about the different coaching stances and why he suggests that ...
Sep 19, 2022•57 min•Ep. 105
“The most important part about building an experiment-driven culture is to make it safe to fail and to fail in good ways." Lisi Hocke is an active figure in the global testing community. In this episode, Lisi shared her lessons learned growing an experiment-driven quality culture in her recent years. Lisi shared why it is important to have an experimentation mindset before we adopt something new or any good practices and to have a safe environment to execute those experiments. Lisi shared her ad...
Sep 12, 2022•59 min•Ep. 104
“A way to boost productivity is to create high-quality software from the outset, so that teams can spend less time on rework, both during development and after the release." Karl Wiegers is the author of “Software Development Pearls” and the Principal Consultant at Process Impact. In this episode, Karl shared some lessons he has learned over the past five decades of his career. We first discussed software requirement, its role for communication, and the importance of defining the right requireme...
Sep 05, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 103
“Instead of being given a roadmap of features, an empowered team is given a problem to solve and they get to figure out the best way to solve that problem." Marty Cagan is the founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group and the author of “Inspired” and “Empowered”. In this episode, we discussed how companies ought to build great products by learning from the best product companies. Marty explained the importance of building the right product and shared the two inconvenient truths about building ...
Aug 29, 2022•51 min•Ep. 102
“As a servant leader, your number one job is to serve the people around you. You succeed together with your people, and that’s why serving them first would give you the best opportunity to succeed together." Henry Suryawirawan is the host of your beloved podcast. In this episode, hosted by Jerome Poudevigne, we uncovered lessons from Henry’s career journey and from running the Tech Lead Journal podcast. Henry shared his career turning points that included multiple transitions between individual ...
Aug 22, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 101
🎙️ CELEBRATE the 100th EPISODE by submitting your story/message at techleadjournal.dev/celebrate-100 🎉 “Engineering discipline is the most effective, efficient way of doing high-quality work. If our software development practices do not allow us to build better software faster, we should really change them because they are not engineering." Dave Farley is the co-author of the Jolt award-winning book “Continuous Delivery” and runs the popular “Continuous Delivery” YouTube channel on software en...
Aug 08, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 100
🎙️ CELEBRATE the 100th EPISODE by submitting your story/message at techleadjournal.dev/celebrate-100 🎉 “Acceptance test is any test that a system must pass in order to be accepted. If you can’t ship a system without passing a test, then it is an acceptance test." Kenneth Pugh is an acclaimed author and thought leader in acceptance-test driven development (ATDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD). His works include the 2006 Jolt award winner “Prefactoring” followed by “Lean-Agile Acceptance ...
Aug 01, 2022•50 min•Ep. 99
“Empiricism is at the heart of agility. The fundamental foundation of agility starts with some assertion about value. Every sprint or iteration is really an experiment about value." Kurt Bittner is the author and editor of many books on agile product development, including co-authoring the recent “Professional Agile Leader” book. In this episode, we started our conversation discussing the common misconception of Agile in the modern day and Kurt emphasized that empiricism should be at the heart o...
Jul 25, 2022•51 min•Ep. 98
“A highly functional team defines the right environment and has what they need to be the best professionals they can be. And that always includes agency and psychological safety." Jim Benson is the co-author of “Personal Kanban” and is currently working on his upcoming book “The Collaboration Equation”. In this episode, we started by discussing Personal Kanban, how it differs from a to-do list, and its two main rules, i.e. visualizing our work and limiting our work-in-progress. Jim also shared p...
Jul 18, 2022•57 min•Ep. 97
“Reliability is the most important thing. Your users define your reliability, so make sure you’re measuring the right thing. And 100% is out of the question, so pick the right target." Alex Hidalgo is the Principal Reliability Advocate at Nobl9 and author of “Implementing Service Level Objectives”. In this episode, we discussed the practical guide on how to implement SRE and SLOs. Alex started by explaining the basic concept of service reliability and service truths. He then explained the concep...
Jul 11, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 96
“You are your greatest asset in your career and in your life. Invest in you personally in all areas of life in order to live your best life." Jeff Perry is an engineering coach, the founder of More Than Engineering and the co-host of the Engineering Career Coach podcast. In this episode, Jeff shared the important role of a coach or mentor in our engineering career. We first discussed Jeff’s engineering career clarity checklist and why it is truly important to find the clarity in our career journ...
Jul 04, 2022•49 min•Ep. 95
“An engineering manager should make sure that the team has a good balance of delivering things that the business needs with enough capacity to do it sustainably over time." Patrick Kua is a seasoned technology leader with a passion to accelerate the growth and success of tech organisations and technical leaders. In this episode, we discussed Pat’s latest course, Engineering Manager Essentials, which covers all the building blocks required to be an effective Engineering Manager (EM). We first dis...
Jun 27, 2022•55 min•Ep. 94
“We want to write as little software as possible, and we want it to have as much value as possible. If you actually focus on that, it means you have to be close to your customer." Dave Thomas is the founder & chairman of Bedarra Corp, creator of IBM Smalltalk, VisualAge for Java, Eclipse, Kx Analyst workbench and Skills Matter YOW! Australia conferences. In this episode, Dave shared about his personal research, 42D, on ideas we can use to develop high-value software rapidly. He started by descri...
Jun 20, 2022•58 min•Ep. 93
“Testing is an activity that happens throughout. It is not a phase that happens at the end. Start thinking about the risks at the very beginning, and how we are going to mitigate those with testing." Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin are the co-authors of several books on Agile Testing and the co-founders of Agile Testing Fellowship. In this episode, Janet and Lisa shared the agile testing concept and mindset with an emphasis on the whole team approach, which was then followed by an explanation of ...
Jun 13, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 92
"Pull, don’t push. Don’t tell people what to do. Tell them what results you want and let them figure out how best to achieve the outcome that’s needed." Mary & Tom Poppendieck are the co-authors of several books related to Agile and Lean, including their award-winning book “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit” published in 2003. In this episode, Mary & Tom shared about lean software development, its principles and mindset, and the concept of a pull system. Mary & Tom then poi...
Jun 06, 2022•59 min•Ep. 91
“The simplest way to describe craftsmanship is pride of workmanship. It is the mindset that you are working on something important and you are going to do it well." Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob) is the co-founder of cleancoders.com, an acclaimed speaker at conferences worldwide, and prolific author of multiple best-selling books. In this episode, Uncle Bob shared some insights from his latest book, “Clean Craftsmanship”. He first started by sharing the current major challenge of the software ...
May 30, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 90
“The goal of software is often to sustain an organization. An organization invests in software in order to achieve some goal and hopefully to sustain itself in helping it achieve that goal." Mark Seemann is an acclaimed author, international speaker, and a highly experienced developer. In this episode, Mark shared some insights from his latest book, “Code That Fits in Your Head”, on how to write sustainable software and manage software complexity. Mark first started by sharing why he wrote this ...
May 23, 2022•55 min•Ep. 89
“Observability is a technique for ensuring that you can understand novel problems in your system. Can you understand what’s happening in your system and why, without having to push a new code by slicing and dicing existing telemetry signals that are coming out of your system?" Liz Fong-Jones is the co-author of the “Observability Engineering” book and a Principal Developer Advocate for SRE and Observability at Honeycomb. In this episode, Liz shared in-depth about observability and why it is beco...
May 16, 2022•47 min•Ep. 88
“You don’t know what you don’t know. So when you’re learning something, it’s very hard to identify your own knowledge gaps, especially if you’re a programmer and you’re moving from one language to another." Jeremy Walker is the co-founder of Exercism and Kaido. In this episode, Jeremy first shared about Exercism, a not-for-profit online platform for learning different programming languages. He explained the importance of programming in the idiomatic way, the role of mentorship when learning new ...
May 09, 2022•54 min•Ep. 87
“We need to consider our system that we built as sociotechnical systems. The system is more than the sum of its parts. It’s a product of their interactions. We need to focus on improving the performance of the whole, instead of separate parts of the system." Susanne Kaiser is the author of the upcoming book “Adaptive Systems with Domain-Driven Design, Wardley Mapping, and Team Topologies: Architecture for Flow”. In this episode, Susanne explained how she connected the dots between 3 different me...
May 02, 2022•50 min•Ep. 86
“Today, employees want more autonomy, e.g. work-life balance and working from home, and at the same time, they want more social inclusion to get as many authentic insights into the company and the new job as possible." Jens Olberding is the author of “Agile Recruiting” and an expert in agile HR management. In this episode, we opened our conversation discussing the great resignation trend and its underlying reasons. Jens then shared the concept of agile recruiting and explained how it is very muc...
Apr 18, 2022•47 min•Ep. 85
“The route of becoming a technical leader is helping others up-skill and grow. Once you learn that helping others grow is your objective, then you become a leader." Laurențiu Spilcă is a development lead and trainer at Endava. He is an author of multiple books and a frequent coding livestreamer on YouTube. In this episode, Laurențiu shared his experience as a developer consultant and provided his view on dealing with the expectation for a consultant or tech lead to know about everything in techn...
Apr 11, 2022•51 min•Ep. 84
“Treating everyone as remote is to keep everyone in mind as having the same level, same equality, the same access to information in communication exchanges between people." James Stanier is the author of “Effective Remote Work” and Director of Engineering at Shopify. In this episode, James shared insights from his latest book and began by sharing why remote work is here to stay and the basic setup for remote work. He then talked about the importance of managing our time and energy and establishi...
Apr 04, 2022•59 min•Ep. 83
“There’s a substantial difference between building software and then building software for production and then building software for scale." Mohammed Alabsi is a seasoned technology leader, an angel investor, and a venture fellow at Insignia Ventures. Mohammed worked at Amazon for 10 years, before moving to Southeast Asia and helped scale up Bukalapak towards its IPO. In this episode, Mohammed started by sharing his lessons learned from his time at Amazon, working on EC2, advertising business, a...
Mar 28, 2022•37 min•Ep. 82
