Creativity comes from constraint.

Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.

‘Who’ questions to ask when leading change: The included: Who else could be or needs to be included in what I’m doing? The informants: Who has done things like this in the past that I can lean on for support? The advisors: who could I get advice from or interview to get more insight? The creatives: Who comes from a different field of work, and could add a creative angle to my change?

An important quality of API design is minimalism, also called #orthogonality. This is a quality shared with programming language design as well. Adding new terms or concepts complicates the design. It adds rules, exceptions, and quirks, thus making it harder to learn. An example is the famous “verb in the resource name” dilemma.

There are three perspectives in software development that are not well aligned: academia, thought-leaders/influencers and the work being done in practice. Jean Young

I prefer not to manage the plan of a project in which I am also responsible for the content and the execution. This is a conflict in responsibilities. F.e. both project manager and solution architect.

When balancing between abstracting complexity away and empowering developers, I ask: What’s their goal? How might we reduce the risk of error? What parts of the current experience do developer enjoy the most? What parts are mundane and tedious?

Get your emotions under control Ask at a good time Do not ambush Be open to where you can grow Avoid it if it’s simply true

Take on new challenges (risks). As I wrote in a recent post, you break in (get more scope) by having significant high-visibility wins that get leaders to believe you are “great.” Just being competent won’t do it. Better to risk losing big and switch companies if that happens than to stay stuck in the middle.

You might step into a mentoring mode when you are sharing your experiences, offering advice and knowledge. If you’re a leader in tech, you likely overindex on mentoring because it’s easy. Because you’re proud of your expertise and you want to share and help. Often, a more appropriate mode is to use a coaching mode. In coaching, you careful listen, ask questions and you help someone uncover their own approach to their own problem/challenge.