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In the life of a tech worker, such as an engineer, product manager, or designer, there is a time and opportunity to step into a leadership role. There are many good (and not-so-good) reasons to step into these roles. In the case of so many people around me, It was mainly because they believed they could do a better job than others. This was not necessarily because they were superbly good at leadership from day one but primarily because the leadership approach others had in mind differed from how they felt we should run a tech team and organisation....

Context January 2023 was a six-month mark into my new role in the same company. This was a lateral move, Head of Engineering in the Platform team. While the team was smaller in scale, it was more specialised, with higher expertise tech leaders and a more comprehensive range of scope. One of the key takeaways for me was to stay lean and keep our leadership team leaner. In our team, we managed to keep 80% of our people (including our tech leads) hands-on who publish some sort of artefact to the production environment on regular (but varying) frequencies (aka doing what they love and delivering value to their customers)....

An underrated functionality in some modern IDEs, such as vscode, enables us to write code in the local machine and run and debug them in a remote device in real time. vscode client/server architecture enables this functionality - called “Dev Containers”. An excellent official article on the vscode website explains the setup for the Go debugging. In this post, I will share my experience tailored to the vscode IDE and Docker desktop....

This article originally posted on Medium. Archived here to maintain open access. Trade Me engineering is a medium size team — about 200 engineers — spread across predominantly platform and stream-aligned agile squads. About 80 per cent of our active development and user sessions are across the four major monolithic platforms, i.e. iOS and Android apps, Front-end App, and API. While monolithic applications come with their baggage, they have worked well for us....