Shows
The Financial Coconut PodcastCrisis Management Lessons So You Don't Sink With The Ship [TFC Wise & Shine Ep 57 ft Henry Suryawirawan]Have you ever felt overwhelmed trying to lead your team through a major crisis? In this episode, we'll explore effective strategies for maintaining calm and focus during turbulent times.We'll be chatting with Henry Suryawirawan, host of the hugely popular Tech Lead Journal, a podcast about technical leadership and excellence. With decades of experience managing challenges both big and small, Henry has valuable insights to share.Tune in as our expert discusses simple ways to identify real crises versus overreactions. You'll also learn methods for containing threats, delegating responsibilities, and gaining clarity amid chaos.2023-12-1145 min
Tech Lead Journal#109 - A Strengths-Based Approach to Leadership - Brandon Miller“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 shared when leaders apply a strengths-based approach at work, it leads to a much increased workplace engagement. Bran...2022-10-1748 min
Tech Lead Journal#101 - My Engineering Leadership Story & 100 Episodes Reflection - Henry Suryawirawan“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 contributor (IC) and management, being part of retrenchment, working in a failed startup, and his decision to lea...2022-08-221h 04
The On Call PodcastS04 Call#22: Leading a World Class Scale Up Tech Team, Discipline of Iteration, Servant Leadership, and Engineering Thought Leadership with Flip VP of Engineering Henry SuryawirawanGeneralist Software Engineer. Tech Lead. Cloud Advocate. Podcast Host. Thought Leader. Henry Suryawirawan, VP of Engineering at Indonesia's largest and leading money movement platform (with more than 10 million users) Flip, goes on call with us to share his journey from startup to big tech and now scale up, his leadership approach as VP of Engineering at Flip, how his growth at Flip has impacted his own career and views, as well as his deep interest in Cloud and work as host of the Tech Lead Journal podcast.
Join Henry at Flip in shaping the Indonesian financial culture a...2022-07-2534 min
Tech Lead Journal#95 - Top Career Lessons from an Engineering Career Coach - Jeff Perry“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 journey. Jeff then shared the role of an engineering care...2022-07-0449 min
Tech Lead Journal#94 - Engineering Manager Essentials - Patrick Kua“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 discussed what an EM role is, how it differs from a tech lead role, and the common manager vs I...2022-06-2754 min
Tech Lead Journal#93 - Maximum Value Maximum Speed Software - Dave Thomas“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 describing the current developer’s productivity challenges and touched on the idea that...2022-06-2057 min
Tech Lead Journal#92 - Agile and Holistic Testing - Janet Gregory & Lisa Crispin“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 the holistic testing concept with a complete walkthrough how we can us...2022-06-131h 01
Tech Lead Journal#91 - Lean Software Development Principles and Mindset - Mary & Tom Poppendieck"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 pointed out the problems of having proxies in software development and how it is much better to manage...2022-06-0658 min
Tech Lead Journal#90 - Clean Craftsmanship - Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)“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 development industry, i.e. as a young discipline, it suffers from the state of perpetual inexperience amid expone...2022-05-301h 01
Tech Lead Journal#89 - Code That Fits in Your Head - Mark Seemann“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 book and explained why software development is hard. He also pointed out the difference between software engine...2022-05-2354 min
Tech Lead Journal#88 - Observability Engineering - Liz Fong-Jones“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 becoming an important practice in the industry nowadays. Liz started by explaining the fundamentals of observability and how it d...2022-05-1646 min
Tech Lead Journal#87 - Learning to Program With Exercism and Building Employee Culture With Kaido - Jeremy Walker“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 languages, and shared his experiences running Exercism as one of the largest open source program, such...2022-05-0954 min
Tech Lead Journal#86 - Adaptive Systems with Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design, and Team Topologies - Susanne Kaiser“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 methodologies–Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design, and Team Topologies–to design and build adaptive systems for a fast flow of...2022-05-0250 min
Tech Lead Journal#85 - Agile Recruiting: Hiring in a Complex and Uncertain World - Jens Olberding“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 much relevant to the latest changes in the current job landscape. He emphasized that recrui...2022-04-1846 min
Tech Lead Journal#84 - Tech Consulting and Upskilling Others Through Livestreams - Laurențiu Spilcă“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 technology. Laurențiu then shared the importance of soft skills and why it is...2022-04-1151 min
Tech Lead Journal#83 - Effective Remote Work - James Stanier“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 establishing team norms for successful remote work. James then explained about the concept of treati...2022-04-0458 min
Tech Lead Journal#82 - Engineering Leadership Lessons From Scaling Up Bukalapak - Mohammed Alabsi“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, and B2B e-commerce. Mohammed then shared his journey at Bukalapak and described the challenges that he had to tackle during the...2022-03-2836 min
Tech Lead Journal#81 - Architecture Is Context—Making the Right Architecture Decisions - Eltjo Poort“Architecture is context. You can only make the right trade-offs between alternatives if you know the context drivers."
Eltjo Poort is the architecture practice lead at CGI Netherlands with over 30 years of experience in the software industry. In this episode, Eltjo started by explaining the importance of architecture context and business drivers that can help an architect understand the different trade-offs and options in order to make the right architecture decisions. Eltjo shared the architect’s main responsibilities and how architects should avoid writing big and long architecture documents by understanding the different goals of an architecture docu...2022-03-2152 min
Tech Lead Journal#80 - Personal Agility System - Peter Stevens and Maria Matarelli“Focus on what really matters. If everything matters, then nothing matters. Make sure that what you do is aligned with what really matters."
Peter Stevens and Maria Matarelli are the co-founders of the Personal Agility Institute and the authors of the “Personal Agility”. In this episode, Peter and Maria shared what Personal Agility System is and how we can apply this framework in our daily lives. They highlighted how many people face typical challenges that hinder them from truly getting what they want by using the “life is an ocean” metaphor. Both of them then gave a complete w...2022-03-1459 min
Tech Lead Journal#79 - Domain-Driven Design With Functional Programming - Scott Wlaschin“It is good to improve your processes to make them faster and more efficient. But sometimes what’s even more important is doing the right thing in the first place."
Scott Wlaschin is the author of “Domain Modeling Made Functional” and the popular F# site fsharpforfunandprofit.com. In this episode, Scott began by sharing his view of the need for developers today to become more polyglot developers and learn multiple programming languages. Scott then shared about functional programming (FP) fundamentals and how FP differs with object-oriented programming, as well as cases when one is better suited than the othe...2022-03-0744 min
Tech Lead Journal#78 - Alignment: Overcoming Internal Sabotage and Digital Product Failure - Jonathon Hensley“Oftentimes it’s not about what’s being said. It’s the fact that there’s not a shared understanding of what’s being said. It’s important that organizations proactively think about how they build a common language and manage that."
Jonathon Hensley is the co-founder and CEO of EMERGE, a digital product consulting firm, and the author of “Alignment: Overcoming internal sabotage and digital product failure”. In this episode, Jonathon shared the main motivation for him writing “Alignment”, which is to understand why digital products and services fail so commonly. He shared the concept of alignment, how it alig...2022-02-2846 min
Tech Lead Journal#77 - Transformational Leadership: A Guide for the Soulful and Practical Leaders - Jardena London“We want to create organizations that can surprise us and do things beyond what we’ve designed them to do, rather than a machine, which only operates in the box that you’ve designed."
Jardena London is a business transformation consultant and the author of “Cultivating Transformations”. In this episode, Jardena shared insights from her book on transformational leadership and how one can become a better leader. Jardena shared the 3 different transformational leadership lenses: the “Me”, “We”, and “System” lenses and we covered several important concepts, such as self-mastery, authenticity, psychological safety, resonance and dissonance, and systems thinking. Towards the...2022-02-2152 min
Tech Lead Journal#76 - Learning Domain-Driven Design - Vladik Khononov“Interactions with domain experts play a key role in implementing software. You have to make sure that you understand the problem you’re solving. You cannot provide a software solution without understanding the problem first."
Vladik Khononov is the author of “Learning Domain-Driven Design”. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Vlad started by sharing why understanding business domain is crucial in software engineering and how DDD can help build the shared understanding between domain experts and software engineers. Vlad then explained the two important designs in DDD, i.e. the strategic and tactical...2022-02-1456 min
Tech Lead Journal#75 - Domain Storytelling: Building Domain-Driven Software Collaboratively - Stefan Hofer“It’s great if developers have understanding about the domain, because then they can propose better solutions, that’s not necessarily the same solution that the users have in mind, which are often limited by what they know."
Stefan Hofer is the co-author of Domain Storytelling–a collaborative, visual and agile way to build domain-driven software. In this episode, Stefan shared the story of how he came up with Domain Storytelling and explained how this technique can help us understand business domain better and bridge the misunderstandings between software developers and domain experts. Stefan walked us through how the...2022-02-0748 min
Tech Lead Journal#74 - Rapid Web Apps Development With Anvil & Importance of Product Documentation - Meredydd Luff“Documentation is content marketing. If your docs don’t summarize what your product is actually about, you’re going to have a rough time getting anybody interested."
Meredydd Luff is the founder of Anvil, the platform for building web apps with nothing but Python. In this episode, Meredydd shared his story starting Anvil and his point of view on the latest Low-Code & No-Code movement and whether it would affect the demand for developers. He touched on the importance of domain experts having the ability to develop software and how tools like Anvil could play a part in suppor...2022-01-3145 min
Tech Lead Journal#73 - Continuous Architecture (Part 3) - Security and Resilience - Eoin Woods“Because we ship stuff now almost immediately into public facing clients, almost as soon as we’re writing a line of code, we need to be thinking about how we make sure that it’s a secure line of code and it will be deployed and operated securely as well."
Eoin Woods is the co-author of “Continuous Architecture in Practice” and the CTO at Endava. In this last of a three-part series of “Continuous Architecture” episodes, Eoin shared the remaining two important quality attributes covered in the book, i.e. security and resilience. Eoin explained why we should treat s...2022-01-2444 min
Tech Lead Journal#72 - Managing SRE Toils Using AIOps and NoOps - Amrith Raj“It is important to eliminate toil. If you don’t eliminate toil, you won’t have time to fix problems strategically, because strategic initiatives take precedence."
Amrith Raj is a Senior Solutions Architect at Dynatrace. In this episode, Amrith walked us through the evolution and current state of IT Operations (ITOps). He described how the ITOps role has developed over time and becoming increasingly more challenging with the increased level of infrastructure abstraction and complexity, especially in the current era of cloud and Platform-as-a-Service. In order to manage such high amount of complexity, Amrith shared the importance of hav...2022-01-1752 min
Tech Lead Journal#71 - Strategic Monoliths and Microservices - Vaughn Vernon“Strategy is what earns. Use the strategic and innovative drivers to help us determine what our architecture needs to be. Architecture has to have a purpose."
Vaughn Vernon is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and he recently co-authored his new book “Strategic Monoliths and Microservices”. In this episode, Vaughn shared his story and rationale for writing his new book and why he thinks it is important to include the executives as the readers of the book. He emphasized the importance of focusing on strategic innovative aspects of software development and for driving those innovations using purpos...2022-01-1057 min
Tech Lead Journal#70 - Continuous Architecture (Part 2) - Principles, Scalability, and Performance - Pierre Pureur“Delay design decisions until it’s necessary. Architecture is an art, not a science. Don’t architect for things you don’t know. Your design decisions should always be built on facts, not guesses."
Pierre Pureur is the co-author of “Continuous Architecture in Practice” and an acclaimed software architect. In this second of a three-part series of “Continuous Architecture” episodes, Pierre shared his own perspectives on the 6 key principles of continuous architecture. We then discussed in-depth the two important quality attributes, which are the scalability and performance. For each quality attribute, Pierre described the attribute definition, why it is an importa...2021-12-2744 min
Tech Lead Journal#69 - The Relevance of Project Management in Tech Today - Jana Axline“Successful project managers have a bias for action. They’re out there pushing the project forward all the time and doing all the things that need to be done to make the project successful."
Jana Axline is the founder and Managing Director of Project Genetics, with over 20 years of experience in leadership, project, and portfolio management. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about the important role of project management. Jana explained how project management is still much relevant in the current era of agile and “project to product” movement within the tech industry. She outlined the important skill se...2021-12-2044 min
Tech Lead Journal#68 - 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report - Nathen Harvey“Many organizations think in order to be safe, they have to be slow. But the data shows us that the best performers are getting both. And in fact, as speed increases, so too does stability."
Nathen Harvey is the co-author of 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report and a Developer Advocate at Google. In this episode, we discussed in-depth the latest release of the State of DevOps Report. Nathen started by describing what the report is all about, how it got started, and explained the five key metrics suggested by the report to measure the software delivery and op...2021-12-1347 min
Tech Lead Journal#67 - Continuous Architecture (Part 1) - Principles and Essential Activities - Murat Erder“As an architect, your main focus is to influence what’s running in production and to make sure you make the right decisions, so that you have a sustainable product."
Murat Erder is the co-author of “Continuous Architecture in Practice” and the CTO of People and Procurement at Deutsche Bank. In this first of a three-part series of “Continuous Architecture” episodes, Murat started by explaining what software architecture is and then explained in-depth the six principles of continuous architecture mindset. Murat continued by outlining the four essential activities of architecture that involve architectural decisions, technical debt, quality attributes...2021-12-0642 min
Tech Lead Journal#66 - Time and Temporal Modeling in Event Sourcing - Tomasz Jaskula“Time is important for business. We have to model it explicitly. Temporal modeling means that we use time-based artifacts as first modeling citizens."
Tomasz Jaskula is the CTO and co-founder of Luteceo and an experienced software developer and architect. In this episode, we started off discussing how Domain-Driven Design (DDD) influenced Tomasz’s view on software development approach and its relation with functional programming. Tomasz then explained in depth about the time concept in business applications and temporal modeling, in particular, bi-temporal modeling. He mentioned the different concepts of time in temporal modeling, explaining them using an exam...2021-11-2940 min
Tech Lead Journal#65 - Developing Your Leadership Agility Fitness in a VUCA World - Nick Horney“The best leaders are those that get things done through other people."
Nick Horney is the author of “VUCA Masters” and founder of Agility Consulting. In this episode, Nick shared his innovations in leadership agility that include AGILE Model® and Leadership Agility Fitness, which are the cornerstones for becoming inspiring leaders in the current VUCA world, i.e. the VUCA Masters. Nick also shared how we can extend his leadership agility concepts to improve organizational behavior, culture, and mindset in order to reach organizational agility. Towards the end, Nick shared some inspiring leadership lessons from his 23 years of expe...2021-11-2250 min
Tech Lead Journal#64 - Principles for Designing Successful Web APIs - James Higginbotham“API design centers on effective communication, not just between developers, but also communication that combines product thinking, business, and technology all in one."
James Higginbotham is the author of “Principles of Web API Design” and an executive API consultant. In this episode, James explained why it is extremely important to design APIs properly and shared the five key important principles of API design taken from his book. James also recommended the API Design-First approach–a rapid & lightweight outcome-based API design process–to design and deliver APIs successfully, including the ADDR process and establishing API boundaries (in relation to DDD). T...2021-11-1552 min
Tech Lead Journal#63 - Being an Effective Generalist & Building Good Developer Experience - Deepu K Sasidharan“If you’re a generalist, and if you’re good at multiple things, then you have a lot of options. You have a lot of career paths to choose from."
Deepu K Sasidharan is a polyglot developer and a Senior Developer Advocate for DevOps at Okta. In this episode, Deepu shared why he consciously becomes a polyglot and generalist developer. He emphasized the importance of knowing more than one thing in the current rapidly changing tech industry. He gave practical tips for new engineers to start out and shared his technique to learn new stuffs, including languages, by bui...2021-11-0844 min
Tech Lead Journal#62 - You're Never Coding Alone, How to Be a Good Team Coder - Fernando Doglio“Coding well with others or being a team player is at the heart of everything we do as developers. Unless you’re coding yourself for a piece of software that only you are going to use, you’re not a solo developer."
Fernando Doglio is the author of “Skills of a Software Developer”. In this episode, Fernando shared some insights from his book on how to be a successful software developer. He highlighted that software development is a mostly a team effort and shared tips on how we can work well within a team, including not to fall into...2021-11-0147 min
Tech Lead Journal#61 - The Programmer's Brain and the Importance of Cognition - Felienne Hermans“Understanding what makes code readable from a cognitive perspective will help you design better. There are so many areas of programming where knowing something about knowing is just going to make you happier and more effective."
Felienne Hermans is the author of “The Programmer’s Brain” and an Associate Professor at Leiden University. She is also the creator of the Hedy programming language, the co-founder of Joy of Coding conference, and a host at Software Engineering Radio podcast. In this episode, Felienne explained why programming is one of the most demanding cognitive activities and described the three differen...2021-10-2553 min
Tech Lead Journal#60 - Software Tradeoffs and How to Make Good Programming Decisions - Tomasz Lelek“Software engineering involves a lot of decisions, and that decision has some trade-offs. We have pros and cons. It’s not like one decision is always better than the other."
Tomasz Lelek is the author of “Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs”. In this episode, Tomasz shared what led him to write his book and one of the past software mistakes from his career experience. He also gave advice on how software developers should approach the potential software mistakes and explained some typical trade-offs when making software engineering design decisions, such as code duplication vs flexibility, premature optimization vs optimizi...2021-10-1844 min
Tech Lead Journal#59 - DevOps Solutions to Operations Anti-Patterns - Jeffery Smith“DevOps is about creating a collaborative environment between the development team and the operations team, and aligning goals and incentives between those two teams. Because so many of the problems that we encounter in life, not just even in technology, are due to misalignment of goals."
Jeffery Smith is the author of “Operations Anti-Patterns, DevOps Solutions” and the Director of Production Operations at Centro. In this episode, Jeffery described DevOps essentials and emphasized what DevOps is not. He also explained about CAMS, a framework that outlines the core components required for successful DevOps transformation. We then discussed three...2021-10-1152 min
Tech Lead Journal#58 - Principles for Writing Valuable Unit Tests - Vladimir Khorikov“The main goal of unit testing is to enable sustainable growth of your software project that enables you to move faster with a more quality code base."
Vladimir Khorikov is the author of “Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns” and the founder of Enterprise Craftsmanship blog. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about unit testing. Vladimir broke down the four pillars of unit testing and the anatomy of a good unit test, as well as mentioned a couple of common unit testing anti-patterns. We also discussed topics such as test-driven development, code coverage and other unit testing metric...2021-10-0453 min
Tech Lead Journal#57 - Observing Your Production Systems and Yourself - Jamie Riedesel“Software telemetry is what you use to figure out what your production systems are doing. It’s all about shortening that feedback loop between the user experience and the engineers who are writing the user experience."
Jamie Riedesel is a Staff Engineer at Dropbox working on the HelloSign product and also the author of “Software Telemetry”. In this episode, Jamie shared an overview of software telemetry and explained why it is important for us to understand how our production systems are behaving by using those telemetry data. She also explained different software telemetry types, concepts such as observab...2021-09-271h 06
Tech Lead Journal#56 - Refactoring–The Discipline for Writing Good Code - Christian Clausen“Good code should be resilient to bugs. It should make it easier to do the changes that you want to the system. Some refactoring could make it harder to make changes. So, if you guess wrongly the direction of the software, then it can have a negative effect."
Christian Clausen is a Technical Agile Coach specializing in teaching teams on how to refactor their code properly. He is also the author of “Five Lines of Code”. In this episode, Christian explained in-depth about refactoring, when and how we should do refactoring, the components, workflow, and pillars of refact...2021-09-2050 min
Tech Lead Journal#55 - It's Time to Own Your Tech Career - Don Jones“Decide where it is you’re going and what kind of career you need to live the life you want and aim for that really deliberately. Because if you don’t know where you’re going, then you never will get there."
Don Jones is the author of “Own Your Tech Career” and the VP of Developer Skills at Pluralsight. 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 keep chasing promotion and more money continuously, and thus winding up in a rat rac...2021-09-1355 min
Tech Lead Journal#54 - Jumping Into Tech Leadership Roles - Alvaro Moya“Going from development to management is not a promotion. It’s an entirely new career. And there is normally a lack of proper guidance for that."
Alvaro Moya is the founder of Lidr, a community that prepares and transforms the tech leaders and CTOs of tomorrow through immersive, experiential, and community-driven programs. In this episode, Alvaro shared the story of Lidr and why he started it, learning from his own journey working in multiple startups and scaleups. Alvaro then shared his view on technical leadership, the challenges surrounding it, and why it is important for companies to prio...2021-09-0651 min
Tech Lead Journal#53 - Principles for Adopting Microservices Successfully - Chris Richardson“The whole point of microservices and adopting microservices is not to have microservices. The goal is to improve the software delivery key metrics, i.e. rapid, reliable, frequent, and sustainable delivery of software."
Chris Richardson is a recognized thought leader in microservices and the author of “Microservices Patterns”. In this episode, we opened our conversation talking about the current state of microservices vs monolith architecture. Chris then explained why he thinks monolith is not actually an anti-pattern and when it’s a good time for us to consider adopting microservice architecture. He then shared about the success triangle...2021-08-3052 min
Tech Lead Journal#52 - Software Qualities for Quality Software - Marco Faella“Seriously good software is not just software that works. It is not just software that satisfies its functional requirements, so it does the right thing, but it also does it in the right way."
Marco Faella is an associate professor at the University of Naples Federico II and the author of “Seriously Good Software”. In this episode, Marco explained what he means by seriously good software, looking at software quality from multiple different perspectives. We then dived deep into several of those software qualities with some practical tips on how software engineers can improve their craft to produc...2021-08-2353 min
Tech Lead Journal#51 - JHipster Open Source Story and Java at Microsoft - Julien Dubois“The most important thing is to make it easy for people to contribute. And the second thing is to have as many people as possible. For that, you build a community, and decide what people you want in your community."
Julien Dubois is the creator of JHipster and manages the Java Developer Advocacy team at Microsoft. In this episode, Julien shared about the state of Java for cloud native applications, as well as Java adoption within Microsoft and Azure. Julien also shared his story on founding JHipster, his developer advocacy work at Microsoft, as well as some ti...2021-08-1648 min
Tech Lead Journal#50 - Riding the Architect Elevator to the Cloud - Gregor Hohpe“The cloud is a change in operating model. It isn’t IT procurement. If you don’t change the way your organization works, the cloud is going to look much more like another data center.“
Gregor Hohpe is the author of “Software Architect Elevator” and “Cloud Strategy”. In this episode, Gregor started our conversation by explaining the role of a software architect, the reason for the latest resurgence of the role, and his software architect elevator concept. He then described what a good architecture should look like and how to deal with trade-offs by using the analogy of financial opt...2021-08-091h 09
Tech Lead Journal#49 - Visualizing Your Value Stream With Kanban - Dimitar Karaivanov“Kanban is a flow strategy that helps you to optimize the flow of value through your value streams from ideation to customer."
Dimitar Karaivanov is a Lean-thinker, a Kanban practitioner, and the CEO and co-founder of Kanbanize. In this episode, Dimitar shared his story on how he got fascinated by the simplicity and the effectiveness of Kanban, which then led him to start Kanbanize. He shared in-depth the concept of Kanban and why Kanban becomes one of the most popular Lean practices. Dimitar then shared about the principles, practices, and anti-patterns behind Kanban, as well as tips on...2021-08-0247 min
Tech Lead Journal#48 - Communicate to Become a Happy & Productive Engineer - Chris Laffra“A lot of engineers are unhappy and a lot of that has to do with not being able to control their environment, or even articulate what they want to have changed in the environment. By becoming a better communicator, you will also become happier."
Chris Laffra is an experienced and talented software engineer having worked in companies such as IBM, Google, and Uber. His wide variety of experiences ensures Chris understands what motivates engineers, what stresses them out, and how to help them get the most out of themselves. In this episode, Chris shared some insights from hi...2021-07-2659 min
Tech Lead Journal#47 - Micro-Frontends and the Socio-Technical Aspect - Luca Mezzalira“Micro-frontends are representations of business subdomains. We should differentiate them from components, because components are solving technical problems. Micro-frontends are looking from the product side on how you can create value in isolation for your users."
Luca Mezzalira is a Principal Architect at AWS, an expert on micro-frontends, and the author of the upcoming “Building Micro-Frontends” book. In this episode, Luca described the concept of micro-frontends in-depth, along with the where and when companies should apply this concept for building the frontends. Luca also shared about the principles behind micro-frontends, why it is important to be technology agnost...2021-07-1951 min
Tech Lead Journal#46 - Business Agility - Evan Leybourn“Business agility is a set of organizational capabilities, behaviors, and ways of working that afford your business the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose, no matter what the future brings."
Evan Leybourn is the founder and CEO of Business Agility Institute. In this episode, Evan shared about the current maturity of agile adoption and how agile has matured over the years by looking at 3 different agility categories, including business agility. Evan then explained further what business agility means, and his interesting story of why he started the Business Agility Institute. He then explained in-depth the co...2021-07-1251 min
Tech Lead Journal#45 - The Future of Digital Healthcare - Dr. Yong Chern Chet“A lot of us in clinical practice always thought of technology as a tool. Today, technology has become not just a “what”, but it’s become a “how”. That means how you practice medicine can be enabled through technology itself."
Dr. Yong Chern Chet is the founding COO of a Southeast Asian region early stage digital health start-up headquartered in Singapore with a simple mission of enabling “Better Healthcare for All”. In this episode, Dr. Chet shared about the current challenges in healthcare and how technology can be used to overcome those challenges. He then shared about his 5C model tha...2021-07-0550 min
Tech Lead Journal#44 - Team Topologies - Manuel Pais“Practices and principles are necessary and useful, but they should be informed by what the constraints are in the first place. We need to acknowledge the constraints, and then build and decide on practices and principles based on that."
Manuel Pais is the co-author of “Team Topologies” and a DevOps thought leader, focusing on team interactions, delivery practices, and accelerating flow. In this episode, Manuel shared great insights from his book “Team Topologies”, starting from highlighting some constraints that organizations typically face, such as Conway’s Law and cognitive load. Manuel then explained the 4 fundamental team topologies and how they...2021-06-2851 min
Tech Lead Journal#43 - The SPACE of Developer Productivity and New Future of Work - Dr. Jenna Butler“Hybrid work is here to stay. It is going to continue. But we want to make sure that it comes in a way that’s equitable and everyone gets to experience the benefits of it."
Dr. Jenna Butler is a Visiting Research Fellow at Microsoft Research in the Productivity and Intelligence Team. She is also an adjunct Professor at Bellevue College in radiation therapy. In this episode, Dr. Jenna shared about the SPACE of developer productivity framework and how developer teams can use the 5 dimensions to measure and increase productivity. Dr. Jenna also shared about the New Futu...2021-06-2158 min
Tech Lead Journal#42 - Chaos Engineering - Mikołaj Pawlikowski“Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on the system in order to increase your confidence that the system will survive difficult conditions."
Mikołaj Pawlikowski is an engineering lead at Bloomberg and the author of “Chaos Engineering: Site reliability through controlled disruption“. In this episode, Miko shared about what chaos engineering is, including clarifications on some of the common misconceptions. Miko also mentioned about the chaos engineering tools, steps and prerequisites to do chaos engineering, and the skill set required of a chaos engineer, and how we should explain the rationale and motivation behind chaos engineering to get...2021-06-1452 min
Tech Lead Journal#41 - Building a Cybersecurity Career & Pandemic Security Gaps - Tony Jarvis“Back when work from home became suddenly virtually overnight, it was all about enabling the business to continue. A lot of this move was rushed out of necessity, but the focus was on speed. The focus was not on security. And security took a backseat."
Tony Jarvis is a CISO advisor and cybersecurity strategist who has advised Fortune 500 clients across the world and served as a thought leader within the industry. In this episode, Tony shared about the importance of network and Operating System knowledge in cybersecurity, the awareness of and attitude towards cybersecurity in enterprises, as we...2021-06-0759 min
Tech Lead Journal#40 - Data-Driven DevOps With Launchable - Kohsuke Kawaguchi“By and large, the way people put together the delivery process is by gut and instinct. The next step up from there is to use the data that comes out of your system to help you make the right decisions. When I say data-driven DevOps, don’t rely on this human experience, and let the system tell you. We should be able to find that kind of information from data."
Kohsuke Kawaguchi is widely known as the creator of Jenkins and currently is the co-CEO & co-founder of Launchable. In this episode, Kohsuke shared about data-driven DevOps, developers prod...2021-05-2449 min
Tech Lead Journal#39 - Relearning ABCDEFG & Enabling Technology for Social Impact - Jim Lim“Technology is really impacting our daily life, sometimes without us knowing, and it’s important that we start understanding or relearning what is ABCDEFG. In the future of business, or future of work, there are many use cases of technology that are non-traditional, non-techie people need to learn and know how to use them."
Jim Lim is the founder of the socio-techno network 59stVentures, the healthcare sector lead for NCS, and previously the CEO of Good Doctor Technology. In this episode, I had a fun conversation with Jim to redefine ABCDEFG, which is a shorthand for a set...2021-05-171h 07
Tech Lead Journal#38 - The Tech Executive Operating System - Aviv Ben-Yosef“Tech Capital is about creating something that enables things that weren’t possible before, that genuinely helps the business and enables other people in your organization, and those are the kind of stuffs that eventually end up paying long term."
Aviv Ben-Yosef is an advisor and consultant for tech executives to help them create world-class engineering teams. In this episode, Aviv shared with me in-depth about “The Tech Executive Operating System“, his latest book for first-timers and veteran tech leaders to maximize their leverage, which includes the axioms of tech leadership, producing Tech Capital to drive value vs obses...2021-05-101h 06
Tech Lead Journal#37 - Lean Inception & Fun Retrospectives - Paulo Caroli“Lean Inception is about aligning a group of people to be successful. It’s about aligning the vision and the MVP from three different angles: the business, the users, and the engineers, so they align and decide what is the very first step."
Paulo Caroli is a Principal consultant at Thoughtworks, co-founder of Agile Brazil, and the author of the best-seller Lean Inception and the recent FunRetrospectives. In this episode, Paulo shared in-depth with me about Lean Inception, its connection with Lean Startup movement, the similarities and differences with Design Sprint, how to create a good product visi...2021-05-0355 min
Tech Lead Journal#36 - Building High-Performing Teams with Observability and CI/CD - Charity Majors“A high-performing team is one that gets to spend almost all of their time solving interesting problems that move the business forward. Not doing a lot of toil. Not working on things they have to do in order to get to the things they want to do."
Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, the observability tools for engineering teams to debug production systems faster and smarter. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about building high-performing teams by having observability and CI/CD as the critical pillars to support it. We opened up our discussion di...2021-04-261h 01
Tech Lead Journal#35 - AirAsia Super App Transformation and Lessons from COVID-19 Pandemic - Pablo Sanz“One of the technological opportunities that we have taken during the pandemic has been transforming the mindset to thinking on products, to thinking on platforms. And I think that’s the foundations of the super app."
Pablo Sanz is the CTO of AirAsia. In this episode, Pablo shared with me the tough challenges that AirAsia had to go through during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and how it has to pivot and transform in order to survive. He explained what the AirAsia leadership team did to align the company vision and steer the business and technology roadmaps during the...2021-04-1953 min
Tech Lead Journal#34 - Improving Developers’ Productivity With Universal Code Search and Sourcegraph - Beyang Liu“Developer productivity is not lines of code written. It’s not the number of commits. It has to do with the ultimate problem you’re solving and the users that you’re solving it for."
Beyang Liu is the CTO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, a developer tools company that brings universal code search capability for developers. In this episode, Beyang shared with me his perspective about developers’ productivity and how we should go about measuring developers’ productivity, including the danger of measuring productivity by using proxy metrics. We then discussed the rationale for universal code search and why he think...2021-04-121h 00
Tech Lead Journal#33 - Simplicity Playbook for Innovators - Jin Kang Møller“Simplicity is an experience that makes things easy for users that leaves positive emotions."
Jin Kang Møller is an award-winning customer experience strategist, design practitioner, and the author of “The Simplicity Playbook for Innovators“. She was the driving force behind FRANK by OCBC and OCBC OneWealth app that won her a Singapore Good Design Mark Gold award in 2017.
In this episode, Jin shared with me her insightful perspectives on simplicity and how simplicity naturally leads to innovation. She shared with me in-detail her powerful framework, “Simplicity Diamond“, that is extremely powerful to help us embrace sim...2021-04-051h 03
Tech Lead Journal#32 - CIO Leadership Lessons from Singapore's First CIO - Alex Siow“The CIO is a person who uses IT to facilitate and enable a company so that it becomes more competitive, and it becomes more profitable."
Alex Siow is currently a Professor in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Director of NUS’s Advanced Computing for Executives. With a career that spans over four decades, Alex Siow is well-known as Singapore’s first CIO in the 1990s. He recently published a book, “Leading with IT: Lessons from Singapore’s First CIO”, which is written for the next generation of CIOs, CTOs, and other execut...2021-03-2953 min
Tech Lead Journal#31 - Sustainable Digital Innovation at BNY Mellon - Johnny Wijaya“Your digital agenda is your business agenda. You got to be very deliberate and intentional about your transformation journey. You do it because it’s the right thing to do, and you got to figure out what is that right thing for your organization."
Johnny Wijaya is the Head of Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon APAC Innovation Center. In this episode, we learn from Johnny the sustainable innovation story at BNY Mellon, being an internationally renowned financial institution for over 237 years. Being at the forefront of innovation within the bank, Johnny shared the latest BNY Mellon digi...2021-03-2245 min
Tech Lead Journal#30 - The Engineering Career Dilemma & Growing Through Self-Reflection - Annie Vella“Be the supply to the unmet demand. Things that you could make a huge difference on if only you just go and do it. You don’t need to seek permission. That’s how you end up growing and being noticed."
Annie Vella is a technologist with almost two decades of hands-on software engineering and technology leadership experience. In this episode, Annie shared her engineering career dilemma story, why she resisted getting into management early in her career. She highlighted why women get singled out for their people skills and thus get offered management role early in their...2021-03-1555 min
Tech Lead Journal#29 - A Guide to Technical Writing and Content Creation - Helen Scott“If a user is even reading documentation that a technical writer has produced, they’re probably already annoyed."
Helen Scott is a technical writer and Java Developer Advocate at JetBrains. In this episode, we discussed many things about technical writing, such as the technical writer role definition, the traits of a good technical writer, and how to create a good technical content, including a few gotchas that a technical writer needs to be aware of. Helen also shared with me the concept of community mentoring, and how it can be helpful for the mentee, the mentor, and the...2021-03-0853 min
Tech Lead Journal#28 - Becoming an Effective Software Engineering Manager - James Stanier“The output of a manager is the output of the manager’s team plus the output of the organization that they influence."
James Stanier is the SVP Engineering at Brandwatch and author of “Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager”. In this episode, we explored on how one can become an effective software engineering manager and how to build and run effective engineering teams. We started off by discussing why the tech industry is facing a skill crisis because of the inability of many managers to manage people effectively and the challenges faced by engineers when transitioning to become m...2021-03-0155 min
Tech Lead Journal#27 - Tech Entrepreneurship Venture From Israel to Vietnam - Doron Shachar“I truly believe that what set the superstars or people who are very successful is the ability to tell to themselves to quit. Winners quit fast and quit without guilt."
Doron Shachar is an Israeli entrepreneur living in Vietnam over the past 12 years and the founder & CEO of Renova Cloud, an AWS and GCP Consulting Partner in Vietnam. In this episode, we looked at the essence of Israeli entrepreneurship as we first learned about Doron’s childhood & education in Israel and how he built valuable leadership skills throughout his years in the scouts and the army. As we u...2021-02-2248 min
Tech Lead Journal#26 - Experience Design—Apple's Best Kept Secret - Tim Kobe"Most people confuse a technical capability with technology. Ultimately, technology is a technical capability plus the human outcome that it creates."
Tim Kobe is a design leader, author, and founder of Eight Inc., a global award-winning strategic design firm also widely recognized as “Apple’s best kept secret”. In this episode, we looked at how successful brands build radical impact by creating ground-breaking human experiences with design.
We started off with Tim’s career journey, the founding of Eight Inc., and how he ended up working with Steve Jobs for over 12 years, including coming up with the...2021-02-1557 min
Tech Lead Journal#25 - Software Craftsmanship & Modernization - Sandro Mancuso“When I think about well-crafted software, it’s code that we are not scared to change. The code clearly specifies what it does. When we change one part of it, don’t break the other. You always feel that you are in control. You are controlling the code, not the other way around."
Sandro Mancuso is the author of “The Software Craftsman” and co-founder of Codurance. In this episode, Sandro shared his great insights on how developers can become a software craftsman by adopting professionalism, pragmatism, and pride mindset to achieve higher levels of technical excellence. We started of...2021-02-0855 min
Tech Lead Journal#24 - Best Practices for Your Developer Onboarding Process - Tanaka Mutakwa“When you recruit an engineer on your team, you actually want to make sure from their first day on, you give them the smoothest entry into your company and help them and assist them in as many ways as you can to become productive as fast as possible."
Tanaka Mutakwa is the VP of Engineering at Names & Faces and the founder of the Tech Leadership community in South Africa. In this episode, Tanaka shared with me his best practices for onboarding new technical hires and developers into the team. We started off by discussing tech landscape, startup sc...2021-02-011h 02
Tech Lead Journal#23 - Earn People & Leadership Lessons From Hyperscaling Gojek - Ajey Gore“I always deliver myself against these four things: you should stay true to learning; be curious, understand what is going on; optimize for people, don’t optimize for money; and if you want to do something, there’s only one reason to do it, that you want to do it."
Ajey Gore is an Operating Partner at Sequoia Capital India who was previously the Group CTO of Gojek. He helped build a strong Gojek engineering team with his passion, strategic insight, and innovative mindset, which was highly crucial in transforming Gojek to become Indonesia’s first decacorn. In this...2021-01-2557 min
Tech Lead Journal#22 - How to Facilitate Great Retrospectives - Aino Vonge Corry“A retrospective is a time set aside where you are looking at what has happened, you’re appreciating what happened, and you’re learning from what happened. And then you improve the ways of how you’re doing things."
Aino Vonge Corry is an independent consultant, agile coach, and the founder of Metadeveloper. She recently published her book ”Retrospectives Antipatterns” that describes the antipatterns and mistakes that she has made from facilitating retrospectives for the past 15 years, and what we can learn to avoid those. In this episode, we had a deep discussion about retrospectives and what we should pa...2021-01-241h 02
Tech Lead Journal#21 - Domain-Driven Design and Event-Driven Architecture - Vaughn Vernon“Programmers have to come out of their cubicles. Innovative software development doesn’t happen with one person in a cubicle with great ideas. Because it’s not just even about code. Anybody can write code. It’s about what does the code accomplish. And if the code accomplishes something innovative, great!"
Vaughn Vernon is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and reactive software development. He is well-known for his best-selling DDD books and IDDD workshops. In this episode, we discussed many things about Domain-Driven Design and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). Apart from the fundamentals, Vaughn shared many of his i...2021-01-111h 06
Tech Lead Journal#20 - Building Products People Love—Lessons from Decades at Apple and Adobe - Arno Gourdol“The most important thing we can do in order to get whatever success we want—build the best product you can. Invest all your energy in making the product absolutely best that you can think of. If you really focus on building an absolutely best product possible, everything else will follow."
Arno is an inspiring tech leader with decades of experience in two major creative companies—Apple and Adobe. I’m honored to have him sharing his career journey and passion in this episode. Arno shared his amazing start of his career at Apple, especially when Steve Jobs cam...2020-12-2159 min
Tech Lead Journal#19 - Scaling Collaboration Across the Globe - Ranganathan Balashanmugam“With machines, you know there are limitations. You can’t go beyond that. You have to upgrade your machines. Or the technology changes. But with people, the interesting part is: if you get all the parts right, the sum of the parts will be definitely greater than adding them together."
Ranganathan Balashanmugam is the co-founder and CTO of EverestEngineering. He is passionate about scaling and leading distributed teams, where most of us can relate to with the remote working becoming a norm nowadays. I had a pleasant conversation with him in this episode to discuss many strategies and...2020-12-1456 min
Tech Lead Journal#18 - Succeeding in Tech & Cloud Latest - Kelsey Hightower“What I come to realize is that technology doesn’t move that fast. The fundamentals are roughly the same. It’s the fact that we don’t necessarily teach fundamentals. When you start to focus on the fundamentals, then you don’t mentally get attached to one particular implementation."
Kelsey Hightower is one of the leading figures in open source, cloud computing, and Kubernetes. I’m extremely excited to have him with me sharing a lot of his insights around many things in tech. We started the conversation with what he has been doing recently—his involvement in serverless...2020-12-071h 16
Tech Lead Journal#17 - Remote Work & Asynchronous Communication at Doist - Gonçalo Silva“Asynchronous communication promotes flow. And flow is generally what we’re all looking for. Not only because it’s more productive. Not only it’s because it’s within this state that we produce the best work. It’s also within this state that we feel the most fulfilled."
Gonçalo is the CTO of Doist, the remote-first company behind Todoist and Twist that has a mission of building the future of work by creating tools that promote more fulfilling ways to work and live. Doist has been a remote-first company practically since the founder started working on Todoist in...2020-11-301h 03
Tech Lead Journal#16 - Responsible AI and Building Trust in AI - Liu Feng-Yuan“Having the conversation within the business, the data science teams, and the technology teams about what problems are you trying to solve? What can AI do with the data that you have? Sometimes business comes with a lot of problems that are like science-fiction."
Feng-Yuan is the co-founder and CEO of BasisAI, a Singapore-headquartered augmented intelligence software company that helps data-driven enterprises deploy AI responsibly. He has a vast experience in the tech sector, working with the Land Transport Authority Singapore to make public transport more efficient; and with GovTech pushing data initiatives for Singapore’s Smart Nati...2020-11-2351 min
Tech Lead Journal#15 - Tech Resumes & Learnings From Uber Engineering Manager - Gergely Orosz“The goal of your resume is to get a recruiter call. It’s a binary yes or no. That is the goal. As soon as you have your recruiter call, your resume doesn’t really matter that much."
Gergely is a seasoned software engineer and engineering manager, previously worked in hypergrowth companies such as Uber, Skyscanner, and Skype. He is the author of “The Tech Resume Inside Out” book and “The Pragmatic Engineer” blog. In this episode, he shared about his interesting programmer-to-manager career journey path, starting from small companies and moving to hypergrowth startups. We then discussed on t...2020-11-1657 min
Tech Lead Journal#14 - Founding Microsoft Office 365 & Digital Transformation - Richard Koh“Organizations should never set up a central digital transformation office. It should be owned by everybody in the organization. It’s not a CIO’s job. It’s the CEO’s job."
Richard Koh is the CTO of Microsoft Singapore who played a major part in the Office 365 founding team. In this episode, I had an inspiring discussion with him around his journey founding the Office 365, the challenges he faced, and on how to approach digital transformation adoption. Our conversation started with some interesting observations on how organizations in Singapore are adapting to the COVID-19 impact, followed by the uni...2020-11-0950 min
Tech Lead Journal#13 - Startup Growth Strategy & Building Gojek Data Team - Crystal Widjaja“Goal on the behaviors that matter. Don’t goal on your vanity metrics. Figure out what it is that, not just works for your product, but also for you as an individual."
Crystal Widjaja is a startup growth advisor and a Forbes 30 Under 30. She was most recently the SVP of Business Intelligence and Growth for Gojek. She is also the co-founder of Generation Girl, a non-profit organization that introduces young girls to STEM.
In this episode, I had a fascinating chat with Crystal on many things about startup and her exhilarating journey with Gojek as the...2020-11-021h 11
Tech Lead Journal#12 - Singapore's Open Government Products - Li Hongyi“You can run an organization where you communicate clearly, and you treat people fairly, and you try to set people up for success. I have seen it work, and I can make that happen, and I remember that it is possible."
Hongyi is the Director of Open Government Products, a division of the Government Technology Agency of Singapore. He leads an experimental team of engineers, designers, and product managers who build technology for the public good, such as Data.gov.sg, Parking.sg, FormSG, Go.gov.sg, and Isomer.
In this episode, I had an in...2020-10-2646 min
Tech Lead Journal#11 - The Journey to Humanise Software Development - Joshua Partogi“Courage needs to be emphasized even more in software development context. That’s related with respect. We cannot expect the developers will be courageous, to tell the truth, to have integrity, unless the organization, the management respect them as a professional."
Joshua initially started his career as a software developer, but over time became more interested in the people aspect of software development, which then brought his interest in Scrum. He has a decade of experience as a Scrum Master and has been working with senior leaderships to improve enterprise agility.
In this episode, Joshua shar...2020-10-1939 min
Tech Lead Journal#10 - State of Java & Code Review Best Practices - Trisha Gee“As a leader, it’s not your responsibility to do. It’s your responsibility to teach and help your team to level up. Your job is to level up your team, so that you have a team of people who can do it better and faster."
Trisha Gee is a Java Champion, author, and the leader of Java Developer Advocacy team at JetBrains. She has an extensive Java experience with expertise in Java high performance systems, and she is exceptionally passionate about sharing things that help real developers. Trisha is an author of a few books: “What to Look...2020-10-1256 min
Tech Lead Journal#9 - Tech Leadership & Hypergrowth at Fintech Bank N26 - Patrick Kua“A Tech Lead is a person with a technical background, typically an engineer who is leading a team and particularly responsible and accountable for their technical direction."
Patrick Kua is a seasoned technology leader and is passionate about accelerating the growth and success of tech organizations and technical leaders. Before going independent recently, Pat was the CTO and Chief Scientist of N26 (Berlin, Germany), where he transformed the early stage startup culture and led the Product & Technology teams for hypergrowth. Before N26, Pat spent 13+ years in ThoughtWorks as a Technical Principal Consultant, where he researched deep into th...2020-10-051h 04
Tech Lead Journal#8 - Digital Transformation Journey in SP Digital - Chang Sau Sheong“There is no permanent failure and there is no guarantee of success either. What you define as success, what you define as failure is just a definition."
Sau Sheong is the CEO of SP Digital, an energytech company, part of SP Group, the leading energy utility in Asia Pacific and one of Singapore’s largest corporations. In this episode, Sau Sheong shared with me about the digital transformation journey that he embarked in SP Digital, including some success and failure stories. His achievements during this transformation journey led him to winning the “Executive of the Year for Utilit...2020-09-2843 min
Tech Lead Journal#7 - Continuous Delivery and Secrets of Consulting - Sriram Narayanan“Continuous Integration is when you are integrating with the other developers on the code base as soon as possible. Continuous Delivery is when your code is in a deployable state and functionally correct."
In this episode, I had a long deep conversation with Sriram Narayanan (Ram for short), a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks Singapore. Ram is one of my mentors and someone that I always enjoy listening to for all his wisdom and vast amount of experience in the industry. Ram has an illustrious versatile career, successfully transforming his role repeatedly, from being a developer, build & release en...2020-09-211h 37
Tech Lead Journal#6 - Becoming a Tech Influencer Through Storytelling - Stephanie Wong“The thing about becoming a Tech Influencer is, content is Queen and consistency, quality and value matter. That’s the trifecta of creating content that sticks."
In this episode, I had a fun conversation with Stephanie Wong, a Developer Advocate from Google Cloud. Stephanie is well known for her online developer contents ranging from YouTube videos, podcast and blog posts. She also hosts her own YouTube channel called “Steph You Should Know” where she talks about career, tech and productivity tips. Stephanie shared her story on how she started in technology even without technology education background and what led...2020-09-1544 min
Tech Lead Journal#5 - Infrastructure as Code - Kief Morris"With Infrastructure as Code, you’re not trying to kind of reverse engineer or understand what ended up somehow onto each system, you’re actually saying, this is how the system is built and because it’s built from that code. So there is no difference."
In this episode, I had an in-depth discussion with Kief Morris, the author of the O’Reilly “Infrastructure as Code” book. We started from what is Infrastructure as Code and why we should implement this important concept for managing our infrastructure, especially in the cloud era. We also discussed Infrastructure as Code princip...2020-09-0758 min
Tech Lead Journal#4 - Women in Cybersecurity - Neha Malhotra"With the kind of security breaches and attacks that we are witnessing in this era, it becomes of prior importance that we prioritize security at the top."
In this episode, I am joined by Neha Malhotra who has recently been awarded one of the Top 20 Women in Cybersecurity in Singapore 2020. Neha is deeply passionate about cybersecurity and has an extensive experience in driving initiatives across multiple cybersecurity domains. She is also very active in the cybersecurity community groups and kindly volunteers her time to promote cybersecurity awareness to more people and also to champion for women in...2020-08-3142 min
Tech Lead Journal#3 - Agile Essence and Challenging Status Quo - Stanly Lau“Knowing and understanding are very different things. Unless I practice it along with good guidance, I may not increase my understanding."
There are several Agile misconceptions in the industry lately. It has even come to a point where people are being skeptical and starting to doubt the actual value of Agile methodologies and practices.
In this episode, I had a conversation with Stanly Lau, one of the early leaders of the Agile Singapore community, about these Agile misconceptions and what we can do to bring back Agile to what it was originally intended for. Stanly is...2020-08-2238 min
Tech Lead Journal#2 - Community Contribution and Mentoring Junior Devs - Michael ChengHear from Singapore's prominent community builder, Michael Cheng, on how to contribute to communities, and learn more about his latest passion for mentoring junior developers.
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“Rather than being passive about it, why don’t I take a proactive approach to try and find people who are like-minded, who share the same ideals and goals and let them come together and just share."
Michael Cheng has been a prominent community builder in Singapore, having created communities such as Engineers.SG, PHP User Group, iOS Dev Scouts, and recently JuniorDev.SG. There are many people who...2020-08-1139 min
Tech Lead Journal#1 - Startup Tech Leadership - Jerome Poudevigne"Leading others is leading yourself first. That's a very big work of self awareness, and you should always do that."
Jerome Poudevigne is a serial CTO who has co-founded multiple startups with multiple successful exits. Recently, he has been working at Google Cloud and AWS to help startups grow and make the most of cloud technologies.
In this very first episode of Tech Lead Journal, Jerome shares with us his startup wisdom from his lessons learned; advice for hiring, building culture, pitching, and managing stakeholders. He also shares with us his "Rule of 50%", a practical...2020-08-0346 min
Tech Lead JournalWelcome to Tech Lead Journal with Henry Suryawirawan"Great technical leadership requires more than just great coding skills. It requires a variety of other skills that are not well-defined."
In this trailer episode, your host Henry Suryawirawan explains why he created this brand new podcast and what you can expect and learn from it.
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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/0.2020-07-1403 min