Two Free Resources Every Engineering Leader Should Know About

I want to share two resources I’ve found tremendously valuable, that I have no affiliation with, that I wish I had discovered long ago. One is a free Slack community and the other is a freemium newsletter.

👉 You should check them out if you’re a senior/staff/principal software engineer or an engineering manager/director/VP/CTO.

The Pragmatic Engineer

Imagine one of your trusted colleagues quit software engineering and became an investigative journalist, reporting on the topics most relevant to you. Like, seriously — a great investigative journalist who cares about the day-to-day of staff engineers and leaders. This is The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, run by Gergely Orosz.

You get a bunch of regular articles for free, and for a subscription (which I gladly pay for), you get several more. A few articles to give you a sense:

• Inside Datadog’s $5M outage
• Uber’s engineering level changes
• Real-world engineering challenges: breaking up a monolith
• Inside Figma’s engineering culture
• How Big Tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum
• Staying technical as an engineering manager
• What TPMs do and what software engineers can learn from them
• The seniority rollercoaster
• Becoming a better writer as a software engineer or engineering manager

The Rands Leadership Slack

Then there’s the large, active, helpful, positive, non-spammy Rands Leadership Slack — a free Slack community founded and run by author and Apple engineering leader Michael Lopp. A few active channels to give you a sense (and there are hundreds more):

• #staff-principal-engineering
• #career
• #consulting
• #coaching
• #engineering-leadership
• #engage-and-retain
• #help-and-advice
• #hiring-and-interviews
• #management-craft
• #women-in-leadership
• #books-leadership
• #engineering-org

Again, I have no affiliation with either — I’m just a happy consumer of both. Enjoy!