Read online

Happy Saturday!

It's good to be back with all you again. I apologise for the four week break. I spent this time stuffing my face with some awesome festival food and reading Rick Riordan books - nothing technical or work like at all. Now that the indian festive season is winding down, I hope to be back to the usual weekly cadence. So welcome to the sixteenth edition of this newsletter - here’s your weekend dose of great technical reading!

From the blog

I wrote about developer self identities and how managing them effectively is a critical capability for managers in autonomous teams. In most organizations, developers are invited to solve technical challenges rather than being called upon to identify and solve business problems. This means that depending on the maturity of the team, not all kinds of developers will be excited to work in it. Managers can address this by coaching developers to love the problem and not just the solutions they build. If done right, this can get developers engaged with the “why” rather than just the “how”.  Article Link

I experimented with this article a little by publishing it in the bullet-point format I usually use to write. I hoped that readers might find this more concise and direct to consume. Some of you did, but an overwhelming majority thought that the format made the article a blob of points and difficult to grasp. So I will go back to normal prose writing for now - but definitely want to try some more experiments on this format. Perhaps sections of points? Let me know if you have recommendations.

From the great interweb

1. Vasco Figuera talks about why he believes microservices are architectural nihilism disguised as minimalism. There are some good points in this article about logical-versus-runtime architecture and drawing system boundaries.
2. Arnaud Porterie discusses his journey as an engineering leader in his blog. This is a peep into the mind of how a good senior leader operates.
3. Maven 4 is on its way! Maarten Mulders talks about what he is looking forward to in the new and much awaited version.
4. Benji Weber wants to make code worse! Madness, I know, but one with a strong reason behind it. Beneficial tech debt is something that I have always agreed with, and the ability to take on reasonable amounts of it often indicates that the current code is in good shape.

That's it for this week folks. Happy weekend!

-Kislay