10 more things you need to do to succeed as a Tech Lead

Welcome to this write-up of the talk Joel Hammond-Turner gave at DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 12 at Microsoft UK in Reading.

Image of Joel showing the original 10 things by @KayakBikeHappy

Joel works for Landmark Information as a Software Architect and Technical Lead. He said everything in the talk is his own personal opinions, but he is always happy to discuss them.

I thought that this was the most valuable talk of the day. After many years trying to learn as much technical information as possible, I’ve come to the conclusion that almost without exception, the less technical a talk is the more valuable it is, because those talks are much more widely applicable. Even if you aren’t a tech lead these remain very good practices to consider following.

In the image above we see the Original 10 Things.

For Coding Standards, he uses Style Cop and FxCop to enforce them.

Personas are a business analyst technique for better understanding the needs of your users.

For advice on sketches see Ian Johnson’s grok talk. Joel says back of a fag packet drawings cost 1/1000th of the cost of a high res prototype and have just as much business value.

MDD stands for Mini design document and POC stands for Proof of concept.

If you are near the London area, Joel will be giving this talk at CodeNode on Monday 21st August 2017.

The 10 more things are:

1. Break down your requirements
2. Instrumentation — e.g. Metrics.NET
3. Benchmark Performance — BrowserPerf/PerfJankie/BenchmarkDotNet
4. Track your Technical Debt
5. Production Readiness
6. Step away from the shiny thing
7. Security, Security, Security (this lesson greatly overlaps with Lions, Tigers and Hackers)
8. Clean Code Sessions
9. It’s all about the money
10. Keep It Simple As Long As Possible

And one more thing: remember you are a bad ass!