March update

Hello from Awesome CTO newsletter!

It’s been more than 2 months since the last update, I’ve got quite a few interesting materials for you :)

Raw diff results

And now the diff

Recent times have been turbulent for many people, with layoffs and searching for a new job. I hope this articles will be relevant for those affected:

• How to spend your first 30 days in a new senior-level role
  (in addition to an excellent Your first 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering by Will Larson from StaffEng)

• Related: Visualizing Tech Company Layoffs in 2022

In case you’re joining a company with equity / options as part of the compensation scheme, read those:

• Option grants at seed (Index Ventures)

• Joining the new startup, with a handsome stock option allocation

• Equity 101 for Software Engineers at Big Tech and Startups by Gergely Orosz from Pragmatic Engineer

Several useful articles in People Management:

• Performance reviews are coming up by Gergely Orosz

• Meetings for an effective eng organization by Will Larson

• The One Key to Dealing with Senior Executives: Answer the Question!

• Step by step guide to building high performing teams

• Cycle times by Andrew Bosworth (CTO at Meta)

• Measuring an engineering organization by Will Larson

Architecture and Technology sections had few good additions as well:

• Biggest architectural mistake was going full microservice by GitHub CTO

  • HackerNews discussion

• Serverless framework

• Accentuate the negative: making the non-perfect decision. Technical decision making

• Databases in 2022: A Year in Review

• When life gives you lemons, write better error messages

In addition, make sure to check the amazing Developer Roadmaps. I probably need to make one for CTO role too :)

As for leadership, here’re the 3 new links:

• The Leadership Library for Engineers

• Rands Leadership Slack

• Engineering Managers Slack

Please send me any new articles you come across that seem especially relevant for this collection.

That’s all for now. Until next time!