The Barefoot Tech Lead

This is the third post in a series, if you’re just starting the introduction is a good place to start. Check out the table of contents for all the other posts. Knowing what a tech lead’s actual job is can be quite vague and daunting, it’s something that is hard to prepare for as a pure individual contributor. For many it will be the first technical role that involves at least partially running on a manager schedule, rather than a pure maker schedule (a great blog post on the two here). The main reason is that you’ll be having meetings...…

This is the second post in a series, I’d recommend starting with the introduction. You can find all the other posts in the table of contents. Let me start by telling you a quick story (or maybe call it a bit of rant). I had the privilege of being the founding tech lead of the Savings Squad at Monzo. It started out as a minimal squad with a product manager, a backend engineer, two client engineers, a designer and me. No conversation had been had about who was leading the squad, but it was pretty obvious that the product manager...…

This is the table of contents for my series “Tech Lead 101,” get started with the introduction. Posts so far: Introduction Clear leadership Team before description Put people first Personal anti-patterns Technical confidence first If you’re not writing code… Be intentional about habits Write for your readers …

This is the introduction to my series “Tech Lead 101.” Visit the table of contents for a full overview of what has been written so far. I often get asked what a tech lead does, how to do it well, if you still get to write code, and more. So I decided to write a series to share how I approach being a tech lead and, more importantly, why that is the approach I take. Before we dive in, this is an introduction after all, it’s worth giving some additional context on me. In the individual posts I’ll do my...…

Blogs always get written on, but never get to speak for themselves, so I’ll let the blog do the talking for once. I mean at this rate it may even be the more prolific writer… Hi, thanks to Constantijn not making up his mind (and not blogging a lot), I’ve gone on quite the journey. I started out as “ramses.io”, a blog about a electronics hardware engineer in self-denial on his journey to becoming a software engineer (whilst actually blogging more about philosophy). I mean he literally doesn’t even own that domain anymore, what an amateur. Though the reference to...…

I have just finished reading what I think will end up becoming a life changing book for me. It is Matthieu Ricard’s “Happiness: A guide to developing life’s most important skill”. Its a book that makes many fundamental Buddhist teachings understandable and available to the Western psyche, written by a long time French Buddhist monk. As I was reading it, I aggressively book darted all the parts that spoke most strongly to me. At the end this made me wonder what it would be like to just read all these key parts sequentially - so I just did it. The...…