https://leegold.com/categories/engineering-leadership/ Recent content in Engineering Leadership on Lee Goldsworthy Hugo en-au Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://leegold.com/posts/aws-bill-like-servicing-car/ Tue, 02 Apr 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/aws-bill-like-servicing-car/ Shovel cash into the furnace that is AWS/Azure. It’s fine. For a while at least. Don’t do cost optimisation Link to heading I encourage early stage tech companies to not even think about their AWS/Azure bill until it reaches $10k/y. At that point, it wants a timeboxed 1 hour sanity check, with perhaps a few hours of tightening up unused services, then don’t look again until it reaches $20k. https://leegold.com/posts/junior-devs-stand-out-interviews/ Tue, 12 Mar 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/junior-devs-stand-out-interviews/ What can I do? Link to heading I regularly get asked by aspiring devs still studying, and recent graduates who are still looking to land their first job as a software engineer for useful ways to continue to grow while job-hunting. How can I do it? Link to heading Below are great small things any skill level dev can contribute to just about any codebase of any maturity! ✅ Simple Bugs (e. https://leegold.com/posts/cancel-your-performance-reviews/ Mon, 05 Feb 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/cancel-your-performance-reviews/ …or shrink them into insignificance Link to heading Having a spectacular manager early in your career is a kinda profound experience. They somehow see you, understand your goals, weaknesses and likely some of your neuroses too. What they never do is learn those things while you are both awkwardly filling out Likert scales and quibbling over Key Results in the HR-supplied Annual Performance Review template. Nobody likes peformance reviews, and for many folks they’re straight-up anxiety inducing. https://leegold.com/posts/real-full-stack-developer/ Fri, 26 Jan 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/real-full-stack-developer/ Have you ever met a REAL “full stack developer”? I have. Once. Just recently. During job interviews for a client, one walked in and (to my surprise), had no distinguishing visual features (no unicorn wings or horn, not even a faint glow). We explored the usual interview topics, but it only took one sentence for them to convince me they were the real deal. It was weird the preternatural calmness with which they shared how their current employer would sometimes ask them to head out to the warehouse and stack pallets when there were no others with a valid forklift license currently on shift. https://leegold.com/posts/hard-feedback/ Wed, 11 Oct 2023 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/hard-feedback/ It’s all about trust Link to heading I came across this Julie Gurner quote today: “People can take hard feedback if they know you are in their corner” The first thing to note here is that praise needs to be a tool in your toolbox. If none of your feedback is praise, then you should read Radical Candor by Kim Scott asap. Assuming that you’ve got that nailed down, sadly not all your feedback can be praise, but the trick to getting good mileage from the critical kind of feedback is a symptom of how much trust you’ve built in the preceding months and years.