Today’s my last day at Carta, where I got the chance to serve as their CTO for the past two years. I’ve learned so much working there, and I wanted to end my chapter there by collecting my thoughts on what I learned. (I am heading somewhere, and will share news in a week or two after firming up the communication plan with my new team there.) The most important things I learned at Carta were:

Software development topics I've changed my mind on over the course of a decade

Breaking down the feedback cycle process from preparation to follow-up. Approaches I found useful, antipatterns to avoid, and a document structure that can help bring it all to one place. I hope to turn this often-dreaded task into a powerful tool for individual growth and organizational success.

The distributed financial transactions database designed for mission critical safety and performance. - tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle

One of my all-time favorite quotes in our industry comes by way of the legendary VC, John Doerr, where he argues that “we need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” This point captures so much, and gets right to the heart of the most important trait of strong leaders, strong organizations, and strong product...

Learn how engineers thrive in environments where they can focus without distractions or competing priorities.

By Zach Goldberg

7 lessons we've learned while managing 200+ open-source repositories - automation with a human touch.

Marcus Blankenship discusses programmer motivation (and de-motivation), which is key to job satisfaction, performance, and turnover. Travis Kimmel spoke with Blankenship about why engineering motivation matters, the unique motivation needs of engineers, mentoring and coaching for motivation, 1:1s, and self-motivation.

We often talk about being authentic at work. But what does that even mean? Why do these discussions always turn into group therapy sessions without an actionable outcome? I think it’s because we don’t have the vocabulary to truly talk about the problem. To make progress, we first need to understand that there are 3 types of authenticity: cognitive, affective, and conative.

Freedom & Responsibility Culture (Version 1) This is archive of 1st Edition 2nd Edition is at: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664 1 Reference ...

I want to share with you my experience in moving to a CTO position. This post will mainly concern management on the technical side.

How to Win Friends and Influence People book. Read 21,087 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. You can go after the job you want...and...

Listen to this episode from Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers on Spotify. Motivation comes through relationships, safety, and environments which allow everyone to contribute.

Why Agile Isn’t Working and What We Do Differently UPDATE: We’ve written an entire book on this topic! Read it online: Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters. Agile star…

Some of my favorite practices and ideas from almost four years at Heroku.

This post previously appeared in Fast Company. How does a newly hired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) find and grow the islands of innovation inside a large company? How not to waste your first six …

GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij shares 12 steps that managers can take to help employees avoid burnout.

It’s tempting to air your grievances at your exit interview. Don’t. There’s almost no upside to speaking up, and tremendous potential downside. Avoid exit interviews if you can. If you must go, be totally bland; say nothing negative.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told managers to help employees stay focused but "poor performance and divisiveness cannot be tolerated."

It might seem a reasonable question, but it makes some terrible assumptions: lines of code = effort lines of code = value all lines of c...

Let clean code guide you. Then let it go.

The manager’s pathI bought and read The Manager’s Path by the awesome Camille Fournier when it first came out. At the time, I was a senior Database Engineer aspiring to become a principal engineer ...

Lessons learned from scaling Stripe's engineering team.

Hyperbolic click-bait title aside, I wish to convince you that the effective Tech Lead is a force-multiplier and a unicorn-cousin of the…

Trusted by millions, Basecamp puts everything you need to get work done in one place. It’s the calm, organized way to manage projects, work with clients, and communicate company-wide.

For the past four years, I’ve worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present.

Kim Scott cut her teeth as a manager at Apple and Google, and now helps create great leaders as an author and coach for companies like Twitter. Here's the secret that's made all the difference for her.