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Welcome to the week - here's your regular shot of reading material; remember to pass it on to anyone you think might enjoy the read!
The CTO Craft Community is now an amazing 430 CTOs, Heads of Engineering, Development Managers and Lead Engineers of all shapes and sizes, and the conversations have been amazing. If you would like to know more about joining the Community or attending one of our regular Mentoring Circles, fill in your details here, and we'll be in touch!

Check out the TMW Archive. There's some real treasure in there.
Andy at CTO Craft
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Depression: how to tackle it before it takes hold
Talking about mental health is something society encourages us to avoid. When my father died of pancreatic cancer when I was 12, it triggered severe depression. I remember when he died; I wentā¦
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On loyalty to yourĀ employer
Iāve just returned to London having spent the past two weeks back home in Cork where I spent an awful lot of time with my father, a man who set up his first ever email account less than a year ago and a man who has spent the past 30 years working for the same employer.
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How to repair the trust of your team as aĀ leader
I recently came across a 2016 study conducted by Edelman where theyād surveyed 33,000 people in 28 countries. From it, they discovered: One in three people donāt trust their employer. I found this statistic astounding.
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Why People Interrupt (and what to do about it)
Have you ever been speaking with a colleague, client, boss or employee and it seems no matter what you do, you keep getting interrupted? You begin a sentence, then suddenly, someone jumps in to complete it.
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Leadership & Self-Management
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How to Avoid Startup Suicide: Indecision
The above quote is so powerful and so trueāāāmost companies die from self-inflicted wounds than from an external force (competition, economic downturn, etc.). To expand upon this further, I believe there are two main types of startup suicide are: toxic founder relationships and indecision.
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Should engineering managers write code? Wrong question.
I spend a lot of my time advising engineering managers and āHow much code should I write?ā gets asked by a lot of folks new to the role. Many good essays propose one line answers ranging from no all the way to 30% of your time.
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How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More
Most of my coaching clients are CEOs of growing companies, and a consistent theme in my practice is the importanceāand the difficultyāof transitioning from a hands-on leader who personally gets things done to someone who leads in a different way in order to be more effective as the organizatio
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Agile, Engineering & Product
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The Hour of Code around theĀ world
Happy New Year from all of us at Code.org! Revisiting Hour of Code 2017 is a great way to get motivated to expand computer science education in 2018.
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In the Lap of the Agile Gods
Iāve noticed a lot of conversation recently (mostly on Twitter) debating how prescriptive, or not, we should be when helping teams through an Agile Transformation (i.e.
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Let Teams Figure ItĀ Out
In this post, Iām going to describe a team kicking off its continuous improvement adventure. My description is going to raise some questions. Iāll try to answer those questions, and end with why I think it matters. I took some time to reflect on what I was trying to get at.
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Quartering - Identify boring stories (#64)
Categorize stories in 2 dimensions to identify boring ones
Draw a big square and divide it into 2 columns. Label them 'Interesting' and 'Dull'. Let the team write down everything they did last iteration on stickies and put it into the appropriate column. Have them add a rough estimate of how long it took on each of their own stickies. Now add a horizontal line so that your square has 4 quadrants. Label the top row 'Short' (took hours) and the bottom row 'Long' (took days). Rearrange the stickies in each column. The long and dull stories are now nicely grouped to 'attack' in subsequent phases.
(Splitting the assessment into several steps, improves focus. You can adapt Quartering for lots of other 2-dimensional categorizations.)

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Hi, I'm Andy, founder of CTO Craft
I've been CTO or Head of Technology for a number of startups and charities since 2006, across a number of sectors, team sizes and technology stacks. If you'd like to drop me a line, simply reply to this email. I promise to reply to everyone personally.
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