First Top of the Tech digest!
Your index of the world's top tech newsletters
Welcome to the first edition of the Top of the Tech digest! 🙌
This is the first publication, and the format will most certainly require polishing.
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Reading time!
Below you will find 20 tech articles published in November that caught my attention. Tons of good stuff to read about.
An insider’s view into Amazon's culture
Valuable info on becoming a CTO
Alternatives to Scrum/sprints
Productivity/growth advice
Tech markets pulse/overview
Enjoy reading! 🤓
Why sprints are taking the joy out of building software
Leading Developers
Most of us use some form of sprints to organize how we work. We go from sprint to sprint relentlessly without questioning whether this is the best way to build software. If you ever felt that there is something wrong with how we all work this article is for you. It is inspired by Shape Up, an eye-opening free book written by Ryan Singer from Basecamp.
Audience: Software Engineers/Engineering Managers
Value: Improve your team process with an alternative for Scrum/sprints
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
How I built a product in less than 3 days
The IndiePreneur
Orel is a solopreneur focused on building MVPs and finding the right market fit. Shipping new concepts extremely fast and testing them is his passion. In just 7 days he built a product that allows you to deploy and publish a fully bootstrapped NextJS app in a matter of minutes.
Audience: Founders/Entrepreneurs/Solopreneurs
Value: Get your NextJS app bootstrapped in a few minutes
ToT Rating: ⭐
12 ways to become a CTO 💵
Engineering Leadership
In this article, Gregor and John are providing an overview of all the paths that lead to the CTO role. If becoming a CTO is your aspiration and it feels way out of your reach now this article will at least shed more light on how to get there and make this road more tangible.
Audience: Software Engineers/Engineering Managers
Value: Ever wondered how people become CTOs? If so this article is for you
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
How to Become a Fractional CTO
Engineering Leadership
Before reading this article I have never heard of the term “fractional CTO”. The article describes this concept that allows you to leverage your vast engineering experience to get a CTO role without selling all your time in return.
Audience: Senior Engineering Leaders (CTOs, Directors, VPs)
Value: Never heard of what a “fractional” CTO is? Read this article to find out
ToT Rating: ⭐
4 (More) Good Things and 2 (More) Bad Things and 2 Misunderstandings About Working at Amazon: From 12+ Years in Management
Scarlet Ink
Dave was a manager for 12+ years at Amazon and in this article he is sharing an “under the hood” perspective into the good and bad aspects of Amazon’s culture.
Audience: All Software professionals
Value: Very insightful sneak peek into Amazon’s culture
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Thinking, Fast and Slow 💵
Refactoring
This week Luca is reviewing a non-tech book “Thinking Fast and Slow” by a Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman on how (badly) humans make decisions. I happened to have read the book a few years back, it is a great book and this is an introduction to it.
Audience: Everyone interested in biases in decision-making
Value: No immediate value, but it changes your perspective on how you think about thinking
ToT Rating: ⭐ (the book is ⭐⭐🌟 though)
How I got 27 hours in a week by installing one tool
High Growth Engineer
Ever used Cmd + Space on Mac as a “shortcut for all”? Then you must try Raycast - an enhanced “shortcut for everything”. In this short article, Jordan is doing a walkthrough to showcase to you his main 7 use cases for using this productivity tool.
Audience: Mac users (for now)
Value: Boosting productivity
ToT Rating: ⭐
Euro Top Tech Jobs - Week 21
The European Engineer
Ever wondered what are pros & cons of working in Dubai? o% tax rates and tons of capital going there into tech and AI starts to attract a lot of talent and tech founders.
Audience: All Software professionals
Value: Dubai Tech Market 101
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
The engineer’s illusion of speed: How skipping your software development process actually slows you down
Strategize Your Career
This article attempts to convey the value of following a process when building software and the downfalls of skipping it.
Audience: Software Engineers/Engineering Managers
Value: Why you need a SD process and what goes wrong when you skip it
ToT Rating: ⭐
EP138: How do AirTags work?
ByteByteGo Newsletter
This brief article shows you what a Big O notation is in a great 3-minute video, explains what are AirTags and how do they work, defines what deadlock is, and defines how Search Engines work. A lot of knowledge condensed in an 8-minute read.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Condensed System Design knowledge
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Euro Top Tech Jobs - Week 24
The European Engineer
Overview of the European tech market with a focus on countries with the most promising earning potential (aka Poland/Switzerland).
Audience: Software Engineering professionals
Value: Get an overview of the Europe Tech market
ToT Rating: ⭐
Tech Careers in Europe: How to Strategise and Thrive
The European Engineer
Brief essay on how to strategically approach your tech career in Europe.
Audience: Software Engineers/Managers
Value: A 3-step plan you can follow to improve your career
ToT Rating: ⭐
Mental Models for Engineers and Managers 💵
Hybrid Hacker
This article explains 11 useful mental models that you can apply in your day-to-day work as a software engineering practitioner.
Audience: Software Engineers/Managers
Value: Useful mental models applicable in day-to-day work
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
How to debug large, distributed systems: Antithesis 💵
The Pragmatic Engineer
Gergely gives a brief history of debuggers and then does a Q&A with Will Wilson CEO of Antithesis - a startup building the next-generation tool for debugging large distributed systems.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Brief debugging history and intro to Antithesis - next-gen debugger
ToT Rating: ⭐
5 Non-LLM Software Trends To Be Excited About
Engineer’s Codex
It has been hard to spot any new software trends behind the bright lights of AI hype. This article goes through 5 non-AI software trends you should know.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Software trends
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
The slow death of the hands-on engineering manager
Leading Developers
The article name is a bit click-baity and might be misleading. I initially thought that the article forecasts the extinction of hands-on engineering managers and increasing demand for non-hands-on EMs. However, it is about something else. It focuses on two things.
3 opportunities you should look for to do some coding as an EM.
2 examples of EM doing some coding.
Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Coding as an Engineering Manager
ToT Rating: ⭐
That’s it for this week, have fun reading!
Engineering management in the next unicorn app
Leading Developers
This is a short story about a screen-time management startup Roots where the CTO ships a lot of value with a team of only two developers.
Audience: Engineering Managers
Value: Run a small startup team or apply a similar mindset in your own team
ToT Rating: ⭐
That’s it for this week, have fun reading!
Note that paid articles are reviewed just by reading the free version of the article. Paid newsletters often publish half of the article as a sneak peek and lock the 2nd half behind a paywall. Sometimes the 1st part of the article is valuable by itself. I will be reviewing just free parts of paid articles, for now, to focus on the value you can get for free. I will revisit reviewing complete paid articles in the future.