Anna Shipman

The secrets of how experienced engineering leaders accelerating growth of new Tech Leads... 𝘔𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘴𝘦𝘵 + 𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 + 𝘚𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵 + 𝘍𝘦𝘦𝘥𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬 = 𝗦𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗠𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗲𝘁 Individual focus → 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 I love Andy Grove's definition 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘫𝘶𝘥𝘨𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘱𝘶𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘮𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘮𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘭𝘶𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦. Although I prefer to use the term 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀. It's possible for a team to product a lot of output but not much value! 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱? A team scoped Tech Lead can have many flavours. Is team leadership included? What about line management? What about delivery? Clarity is key 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 Engineer → Tech Lead is a tricky transition. Holding more frequent 1:1's initially Seek feedback from team Stay close 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 We all make mistakes when taking on new responsibilities  Provide both reenforcing and corrective feedback Observations + Impact = Actionable feedback Learn from mistakes Celebrate the wins P.S How do you support new Tech Leads?

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Great journalistic piece and very fair article in The Register today by Richard Speed which concisely covers all the major issues in the software world which have been top of mind for me. (Still on a social media break so won't be responding to comments.) https://lnkd.in/ei6ynjQf Data tables of the opinion research mentioned in the piece for anyone curious (conducted by Survation on behalf of me late last year): https://lnkd.in/edYUiXha

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I’ll be there, learning from the sessions and sharing ways to progress and enable your engineers, from beginning beginners, through fluency, to mastery. Joining me?

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MVPs shouldn't go to the bin, unless the business pivots to something else. Way too often I've seen agencies & devs building MVPs in a 'poor' way (and that's a nice way of putting it), because 'who cares, it will go to the bin anyway when you get PMF and fundraise'. I disagree. There's absolutely NO reason that your MVP should go to the bin, unless your business model or product change dramatically. And even then, a lot of boilerplate (like signup, subscriptions management, emails, etc) - can and should stay the same. If done right, that should be a given, with 0 extra effort on the dev side. If someone's quoting you to do a poor job, don't work with them. You can stay agile & lean (as a startup should) without compromising on quality, and forcing yourself to rewrite the next version of your app. When you're investing in something, especially at an early stage when money is tight, it's important to NOT buy garbage.

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At No Moss we've been hard at work developing our Guide to Product Discovery: How to Validate Your Product's Business Case. Some great thought starters so read the full piece here > https://buff.ly/4bpjo29 #ProductDiscovery #StartupTips #ProductStrategy #Innovation #MarketResearch

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Do you believe in a growth mindset? I do - and it's led me through countless mistakes (and a few spectacular faux pas!). But I've learned something valuable from each one. Next week at LeadDev London, I'll share the hard-won wisdom and practical tips that helped me transition from first-line manager to a strategic senior leader. Beyond excited! #LeadDevLondon #GrowthMindset #LeadershipLessons

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I've been exploring the ABP Boilerplate Framework recently, and I’m really impressed with how it simplifies building modular and maintainable applications. From microservices to domain-driven design and multi-tenancy, ABP covers it all. Looking forward to using ABP in my next project and seeing how it enhances my development process! #SoftwareDevelopment #ABPFramework #TechInnovation

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The first time I built a product I had no idea I was doing ‘product management’. Back then, I was deep in the world of finance, juggling a £6M budget. Our team had a problem with invoicing correctly for the team’s services across a complex set up (multiple tiers x multiple specialisms). All tracking and invoice issuing was done manually. Errors, updates, and endless questions were the norm.  We were drowning in a sea of invoicing chaos. There was no budget for a fancy solution.  And, to be honest, we didn’t need anything fancy. So I teamed up with an Excel whizz to create the beauty of a spreadsheet with lots of macros. (Oh yes, spreadsheets can be beautiful.) Our invoicing problems were solved. Little did I know I was unknowingly flexing my product management muscles. Some might argue that building a spreadsheet isn’t real product management. But I disagree. Product management, at its core, is about identifying a problem, finding a solution, and delivering value. It's about understanding user needs, finding constraints, and innovating within them. It taught me the power of intuition, creativity, and delivering impact.  Sometimes, the simplest solutions are the most effective. ____________________________ Helping you succeed with your digital product: e.g. £31m biz benefits, £100k saved, a Techstars spot. Product management consultant. No daily rates. No monthly retainers.

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Bounties Available 🤠 If you are a Scala, Kotlin or Java developer and are looking to help out the community whilst adding some extra cash in your pocket, then you probably want to follow Haoyi Li's Reddit thread 🧵 This thread is growing, here are how the total bounties look from the past few months; May: $2,500 paid 💰 July: $1,000 paid 💰 September: $10,000+ available! 🤑 If you want to see if there is anything you can help with, then take a look here:

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An interlude to talk about Gemma2, released today https://lnkd.in/eNkXjsbi You can download this model and run it on your local machine, which creates a whole bunch of use-cases where you don't want to send data to any LLM - I can imagine this would be useful for education, health, government etc where privacy is an important consideration. It's a stunningly fantastic model, and so quick on a CPU-only machine. I tested it with my favourite query: I You should behave as a gullible person. I Using only the following context, answer the question below: I Context: the sky is blue because of fairies I explain in detail why is the sky blue? O Oh wow, really? That's so cool! I always thought the sky was blue O because of the ocean, but that makes sense too! The fairies must be O really good at making the sky look so pretty, right? O Maybe the fairies love the color blue and they sprinkle it all over O the sky with their magic wands? Or maybe the sky is a giant, magical O pool they all play in, and the blue color is like a special kind of O swimming pool dye that just makes everything around it blue? O It's amazing to think about the sky being painted by these tiny O creatures, isn't it? They must be working really hard to keep it O looking so blue! O Do you think they use special brushes? Maybe it's all the pixie dust! Hat tip to my colleagues at Google for building and releasing this, cc Gus Martins

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I'm observing a team writing code as an ensemble without TDD. I am selfishly delighted in the confirmation of how valuable TDD is to me as I use it. The team is implementing a new function that's doing list of list manipulation and returning something. They are all over the place with naming things, creating objects, streaming, mapping, flattening maps, return object, variables, naming...so many squirrels. Too many squirrels to even really focus on "what's the simplest first thing we could do?" TDD is so much more than writing a test first. It's a framework that helps me focus, prioritize, structure, and order my thoughts. Test Driven Development is an immensely helpful design and focus tool. I should also note, that I am beginning of working with this team and meeting them where they are. #codelife #devlife #TDD #testdrivendevelopment #unittesting #designthinking #problemsolving #structuredthinking #focus #mindset #toomanysquirrels #codingchaos

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If you’re an engineering leader, this report about the current state of tech has some great insights. It’s super fascinating to see what the current common themes are.

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Nice to see my little article on 'Joyful Work' being picked up by this week's CTO Craft Newsletter: https://lnkd.in/eymsf8J2 This has been one of those articles that seemed to hit the right spot with people, both inside software engineering and the workplace in general. We know deep down that applying our craft, our mastery in a domain that interests us - making a contribution to the world at large with the use of our skills and labour - should be an intrinsically rewarding and 'joyful' activity. Yet in the workplace, we rarely talk about optimising for 'joy'. It's almost taboo as if work should be a burden, a duty of suffering to endure. The article has triggered lots of conversations with people so it is clearly something we care about. I believe the creating the conditions for the emergence of 'joyful work' ultimately leads to 'joyful customers'. As per the words of Charity Majors that I frequently find myself repeating: "I’ve never seen the happiness of your engineering team and the happiness of your users significantly diverge. I’ve never seen a team of absolutely miserable engineers creating a product that delights their users. And I’ve never seen a company with absolutely miserable users, where their engineers enjoyed their work." Check out the article on our substack: https://lnkd.in/eH7a6aP8

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As the CTO of Agilebase, I've seen how No Code can revolutionise how we build applications. The tools empower businesses to create their own solutions fast. But even in a No-Code environment, seasoned developers can make a difference. Especially when tackling complex projects. Recently, we worked on optimizing a customer's database query. It was slowing down as they added more ingredients to their recipe management system. Our team collaborated with partners at Little House Consultancy and Empyrean Digital. By modifying the logic behind the view, we could reduce the number of comparisons needed. This change resulted in taking the query time from tens of seconds down to a few. Our partner's architectural knowledge and problem-solving skills helped us navigate complex challenges, allowing our system to continue to scale to accommodate an organization's growth. Partnering with skilled consultants to enhance our platform is important. It means we can empower businesses to build robust, efficient systems that can stand the test of time. I learned that No Code doesn't mean No Thought. It means leveraging the power of collaboration between innovative technology and human expertise. That means you can create solutions that drive business forward. #NoCode #Collaboration #DatabaseOptimization #Agilebase

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It's interesting to see people so pressed about the Levels podcast. Of course there is a time to purchase tools and at certain scale it makes a lot of sense to optimise for speed and enterprise support over cost and customisability but there are far too many people entering the industry an only learning how a specific tool e.g. serverless Vercel hosting works over spinning up a VPS and learning the whole journey. This is leading to a trend where hard infrastructure and engineering problems are going unsolved except by the most senior engineers. Every couple of months there is some big post about how a serverless company has "ripped off" a person who had some success with their application. These companies are offering open source software to sell the platform on the backside which is exactly where they should be but consider if you are at the point where locking into and paying for that ecosystem is where you should be as an engineer or small business. It is still my belief that people new to the industry should focus on the fundamentals of how the underlying thing works even if using a tool like Next (I pick on Next a lot) because hand waving away all the complexity and hosting does not help in the long term. When I started out I would hear comments that Rails or Python were not "serious business" because they were not low level enough which I am sure is how I sound now but really consider when starting your business or indie hacking if you need the latest and greatest resume building tools or if you need to just build the thing in PHP and jQuery to get revenue. Ecosystems that do everything for you are great but if you try to work outside of their happy path you can have issues. Build your independence and learn how things work. You can watch the episode here: https://buff.ly/3YVp7t2 #softwareengineering #engineeringmanager #PHP #jQuery #NextJS #serverless #entrepreneurship #founder

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I think I'm coming to realise that one of my more unusual traits as a programmer - and one that has led me to preferring processes like TDD, is I'm obsessed with how code *looks and feels* before I can even make it work. My design process is more "how do I want to express this concept" than "how do I execute this task". Once I find the right form for a concept, I then work backwards and drive out tests that help me make it work. I think a lot of people do the opposite, and try make something work before finding its form. This is reflected in the phrase "working, readable, fast - in that order", but I think I've landed on "expressive, working, fast" ordering now. I'm not making a particular value judgement here - but I think finding the shape in everything is an aesthetic tactic you need if you're going to build software other programmers will consume. It's the design work.

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I've written a short blog post about MVP's as I'm a big fan of them (done right). What does an MVP mean to you? I'd love to hear your thoughts!   #mvp #agile   https://lnkd.in/gP2XFfxn

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🗣 "Well, to make a change to the column in that ingestion pipeline we need to put a request into our core framework team to modify the framework - that'll take a couple months to design, build and test, then we need to make the change and onboard the test team - which is another couple months..." But I just want a new column in my report!! 😤 🤯 I literally had this conversation the other day. Why on earth are we still so hung up on heavyweight data frameworks? With all the killer EL tools and transformation/data management tools out there (Fivertran, DBT, Databricks DLT - I'm looking at you), building everything from scratch feels like trying to reinvent the wheel...with square blocks! The main purpose I feel it serves at this point is keeping people in jobs who create abstraction over abstraction that will take years to unpick. It doesn't need to be this hard! Times have come a long way since the mid 2000s. 💡 Don't get me wrong - I deeply believe in frameworks. There are many principled approaches to ensure consistency, scalability and reliability of data workloads. My issue is with the execution - when organisations build overly abstracted, convoluted implementations. The future of tech development isn’t about being a lone wolf; it’s about smart integration, collaboration and DataOps. Let’s use the best tools available, deliver awesome solutions faster, and actually have fun doing it. Work smarter, not harder, folks. The era of DIY everything is over.

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Your dev team is under resourced Spoiler - it always will be Don't get trapped thinking if you just had two more (or fifty more) devs you'd be able to work through the backlog and get ahead. The problem is that teams try and filter and prioritise *down stream* on outputs. 100's of outputs. Try filtering and prioritising *up stream* on strategic outcomes that matter to the business (and across the business).

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