Today's guest is Aditya Agarwal.

Aditya is a legend: he joined Facebook as employee #10 and, years later, joined Dropbox as CTO when there were ~20 engineers. Today, he is partner at South Park Commons, through which he invested in more than 300 companies. Today we talked about early stage Facebook, differences and similarities with Dropbox, engineering teams in hyper growth and the future of engineering management. Here is what we talked about: (02:17) Introduction (03:10) Facebook Employee n 10 (09:57) The value of being a "generalist" (12:46) Moving fast and breaking things (19:24) From Cove to Dropbox (22:10) Dropbox vs Facebook (25:56) Finding company's culture (29:23) The challenges of hyper growth (34:42) The hyper growth in the next era (39:35) Engineering managers are more technical (42:42) Being a technical CTO (45:33) South Park Commons —

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Today's guest is Charity Majors, CTO at Honeycomb and one of my absolute favorite writers. I believe I have recommended more articles from her blog than any other author on the newsletter. Today we talked about observability, testing in production, continuous delivery, developer experience and much more. Here is what we talked about: (00:49) Introduction (01:57) What is observability (07:00) Observability in microservices (12:51) From monitoring to observing (16:20) Start observing now (19:36) How to use observability (26:11) Observability costs (31:23) Testing in production (34:09) Continuous delivery (38:24) The greatest productivity offenders (43:04) Caring about the business (46:54) Generative tools add complexity (49:15) Junior engineers leverage —

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Today's guest is Laura Tacho, CTO at DX, engineering leadership coach, and speaker.

At DX, she works with hundreds of companies on improving their developer experience and engineering productivity.

Here is what we talked about:

(02:20) Introduction (03:36) Why measure engineering productivity (05:58) Finding the proper framework (13:33) Value metrics to find issues (15:00) Identify and ease the pressure (18:12) Reaching the proper execution (21:16) Measuring in different environments (25:25) The DevEx framework (27:58) Empowering DevEx in a business (31:56) Patterns for DevEx integration (41:03) Responsibilities ownership (47:48) The DevEx offenders —

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Today's guest is Daniel Vassallo, the creator of the Small Bets community, which counts more than 5 ,000 members and includes engineers, entrepreneurs, and creators of all kinds. Daniel is also a former software engineer at AWS, the author of The Good Parts of AWS and created a successful Twitter course. With Daniel, we will talk about his unconventional journey in tech, the Small Bets philosophy, and advice for engineers about careers, site projects, technology and skills. Here is what we talked about: (01:11) Introduction & background (05:21) Small Bets' genesis & philosophy (14:36) Understanding the market (19:36) Taking care of the downsides (24:43) Improving your lifestyle first (29:05) The dangers of labelling yourself (32:10) Allocating your time (37:13) Self-managing your own work (45:34) Transitioning to a self-employed lifestyle (52:21) The selection criteria for your ideas

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Today's guest is Thiago Ghisi, Director of Engineering at Nubank. Thiago has had an incredible tech career. Before Nubank, he worked at Apple, Amex and ThoughtWorks. He is also a deep thinker, hosts a podcast and constantly shares great advice on X and LinkedIn. During our chat with Thiago, we talked about what makes managers successful, career expectations and frameworks and how to build a great tech career in 2024. Here is what we talked about: (01:13) Introduction (03:11) What makes people in tech productive (07:57) Beyond the feedback loop (11:24) Becoming a technical manager (18:45) How to be successful as Staff+ Engineer (26:47) From expert to achiever to strategist (34:46) Know your context but don't attach to it (46:00) The Four Ps (56:43) Q&A —

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Andrew Weaver is co-founder and CEO of CTO Academy, an educational product that works with thousands of CTO today. Andrew has over 25+ years of executive-level experience with companies of various size, including enterprises, SME and early-stage companies across multiple sectors. With Andrew, we discussed gaining the proper skillset to be a good CTO, the imbalances in the tech space, and how to keep up with the current technologies. Here is what we talked about: (00:00) Introduction

(03:02) What is CTO Academy and how it works

(07:53) What makes a good CTO

(14:01) The CTO mindset

(20:06) Being a CTO in a remote environment

(23:20) Unleashing the "quiet genius"

(28:11) How AI is changing tech

(36:58) Education & micro-learning

(45:11) Q&A —

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Wes Kao is a marketing executive, entrepreneur, and advisor who writes an amazing newsletter for high-performers in tech.

She is co-founder of Maven, an edtech company that raised $25M from First Round and Andreessen Horowitz. Previously, she co-founded the altMBA with bestselling author Seth Godin.

Here is what we talked about:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:08) Managing up

(10:13) Bridging the gap between managers and reports

(13:33) The “Bad Things / Good Things” framework

(19:14) Good communication in the remote era

(24:17) The transition to remote work at Maven

(29:28) Sync vs async communication

(33:41) Asynchronous videos

(38:39) Transitioning to a Manager

(46:57) Psychological safety

(53:03) Over-communicating is communicating

(58:59) Wes’ approach to reading

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Maria Gutierrez is the VP of Engineering at Personio, and ex VP of Engineering and Operations at Twitter. With Maria we talked about how to build healthy and impactful engineering orgs as they scale. We touched on everything from processes to remote work, development cycle, hiring, structuring teams and more. (00:00) Introduction (02:12) Maria's career journey (05:18) How hyper-growth breaks engineering teams, and how to prevent it (09:32) How to balance speed and quality (13:40) What a high performing team looks like (15:46) How to scale without adding friction (19:22) Personio's engineering team and growth (21:02) Remote work: impact, relationships, and challenges (32:54) How remote work impacts different roles (38:09) Transition from engineer to manager (45:08) How to use engineering productivity metrics (51:05) The use of AI in Maria's teams (54:50) The evolution of engineering managers (58:11) Career advice for engineers

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