TLA_insights digest #2

Welcome to the digest #2 of my “Technical Leadership and Architecture insights” (or TLA_insights for short).

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Although this is just iteration #2, I am already pivoting the format a lot 😄 (learn fast and make it better). The following changes were made:

will start publishing multiple records individually in the course of the month. Those will be announced on Twitter & LinkedIn as I publish them - you can follow me there to be notified of new records;
at the end of the month I will send a digest of the new entries of the particular month. Furthermore, will also send a small update on interesting developments on my side or interesting things I see happening in the TLA_insights topics. You can find all the Monthly Digest entries here: https://esilva.net/tla_insights/#monthly-digest
will publish each record separately and keep a list of all of them, which makes it easier to reference to a specific record (and not have to go in a given issue/digest). You can find all the past records here, organized per area and date of publication: https://esilva.net/tla_insights

I hope you appreciate these changes, I am really excited about them as it allows more regular and interesting insights to be published and also create a clearer knowledge base of insights. I have a few other ideas in mind that I will be working on moving forward, so stay tuned!

On a personal note: September and October were very eventful in terms of developments on topics relevant to TLA_insights:

published a new article on my Introduction to Sociotechnical Architecture series, which gives a lot of insights on important traits of Sociotechnical Architecture and Systems. In that article I also provide insights on strategies to approach those traits (furthermore will be publishing real-world examples soon);
participated on the TechLab podcast talking about Sociotechnical Architecture, and how this is so important to maximize the impact of our efforts while building software products;
published long overdue reviews: first for the book Team Topologies, which is also my first entry in this record and then for the book Escaping the Build Trap. Both of these books are amazing resources for Sociotechnical Architects - I find them extremely complementary and a great combo to address the “sociotechnical evolution loop” (from customer understanding, to the organizational and technical systems to be set up and support to maximize/optimize the “value exchange” with customer).

I hope you have fun and find some interesting insights here. Don’t hesitate to contact me via email or on Twitter me if you have questions or want to chat about these topics.

TLA_insights digest #2

Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais

Insights on the book Team Topologies, a book that brings a lot of interesting new ideas on how to approach organization / team design and its "evolution" from a "team first strategy" and "team cognitive load" perspective. The book presents clear motivation for this strategy and then proposes 4 basic team topologies and 3 types of team interaction modes to approach such org design and evolution. 🏷Team-Topologies

“To me, Team Topologies is becoming a reference book to help on the design and evolution of organizations and their sociotechnical architecture!”

🔗 full-text

Secrets of a Strong Engineering Culture, Patrick Kua

Great presentation by Patrick Kua on "secrets" of Strong Engineering cultures, i.e.: things to cater for in order to have an organization that moves at high-velocity, but also is a great place to work, where people feel motivated and can thrive in their activities. By having such traits, organizations also have higher changes of attracting and retaining great talent - a big challenge in our current market. 🏷Engineering-Culture

Building great engineering cultures is not trivial: they take time to build, they are not “projects” with a due date but are a continuum, an infinite cycle of improvements. Make this explicit and make the core elements of your culture visible so people can see it and know how to contribute to it and improvement it.

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Software Architecture, Team Topologies and Platforms, Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais

In this podcast Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton talk about several elements of Software Architecture and traits of modern Software Architects - many well positioned on their book Team Topologies. I couldn't agree more with the core remark of the conversation, which I summarize as: the Modern Software Architect is a Sociotechnical Architect. 🏷Software-Architecture

Modern Software Architects cannot anymore purely focus on the Technical systems anymore. They must be “Sociotechnical Architects”: be able to consider the organizational and technical systems in the problem & solution spaces. Ignoring this is recipe for partial optimizations and in most cases a lot of “synchronization overhead and waste”.

🔗 full-text