Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 30 January 2026.

This week, I:

• realised that I’d started, and not finished, half a dozen books on tech leadership/management
• read a lovely blog post from Will Larson about including engineers in leadership meetings
• realised that the Eisenhower Matrix works well for people, but not so well for teams
• read a lovely blog post from Julia Evans about learning an Old Boring Technology
• felt as though I couldn’t keep up with the management and engineering sides of being a tech lead
• felt as though I didn’t know what a tech lead was, anyway

Tech leadership/management books

Although I’ve been a tech lead for over a year, most days feel like my first day. I don’t feel I’m bad at the job; but I don’t feel I’m good at the job either. My tried-and-tested approach to getting better at something is to read a book about it. So, over the last year I’ve started half a dozen books on tech leadership/management. In alphabetical order by title, they are:

• Debugging Teams, by Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick
• Engineering Management for the Rest of Us, by Sarah Drasner
• Leading Effective Engineering Teams, by Addy Osmani
• Scaling People, by Claire Hughes Johnson
• Smart Management, by Jochen Reb, Shenghua Luan, and Gerd Gigerenzer
• Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
• The Manager’s Path, by Camille Fournier

Alas, I’ve not finished them. I don’t wish to criticise these books: they’re well written,¹ well produced, and draw on the authors’ experience. However, after several hours in each other’s company, the book and I drift apart.

Why?

• I don’t want a book-length treatment of tech leadership/management. I want something like untools (“Tools for better thinking”).
• I want something that’s well written and thoughtful. I have Thinking of Answers, by A.C. Grayling in mind. Good blog posts can be both, but tend toward first-cuts.
• I want something that isn’t over-fitted to the authors’ experience. Whilst there are valuable lessons from Google and Stripe, I work for neither Google nor Stripe. My current team has three software developers; my last team, two. One of those software developers is/was me.

Alas, I don’t have time to write more. But something is better than nothing.