Top 3 posts of the week — November 2nd, 2019

Luka Leskovšek
Nov 2 · 3 min read

Building a Healthy Software Engineering Culture

By Karl Wiegers

It’s probably safe to say that everyone wants to work for a company whose culture is healthy. The reality, on the other hand, is not always like that. Bas Peters and Karl Wiegers talk about software engineering culture.

They start off talking about what defines a company’s culture. And then go through a journey on how to spot a toxic culture. What defines a healthy culture. And what to follow and practice to create and sustain a healthy culture.

I couldn’t agree more with the three levels of commitment. The first is on a personal level — each developer must commit to building high-quality solutions by applying best practices of effective engineering practice.

Next, we move to the organizational level. At this level, the management team at all levels must agree that the software quality is the key success factor. And they need to enable all team members an environment where they can achieve this.

The third commitment is on the team level. All team members commit to always work on improving how they work and continuously improve the product they are building.

The biggest takeaway for me was that all companies are developing cultures of their own. And it is best if you build your culture consciously — with some steering — rather than built it spontaneously.


Principles of Engineering Management

By: Tilo

I always love to read an article on how a former tech engineer transformed himself over time and became an engineering manager.

This week I stumbled upon an article written by Tilo, where he writes about his learnings as an engineering manager. When reading articles like this, I always self-reflect and start to think about how this applies to me.

It is comforting to know that most of the time, we all go through a pretty much the same journey. As a manager, you sooner or later conclude that it all boils down to people, trust and continues improvements of the way the team works and communicates.


Novak Djokovic Used AI to Train for Wimbledon

By: Amanda Loudin

I’m not a big fan of tennis — but I did watch this particular match.
My whole family was watching this in an on/off mode, as this match was quite long.
After reading the article, I started to visualize and re-evaluating the Wimbledon match.

When two great players meet in the finals, it is always hard to predict who is going to win. More or less, it gets down to one’s personal opinion and whose fan you are. Both of them work hard and have the best staff they can afford. But in today’s world, the data is the new gold.

More and more companies are focusing on the data part of the business and tools that would help them or their clients to make data-driven decisions.

The RightChain company used its supply-chain AI platform to build a model, analyzed the data, and serve the results to Djokovic’s team. The approach was to basically break down the tennis ball’s journey from end to end. O’Shannessy explains “It’s a very formal coordinate system that maps the tennis court to a level of detail not previously available.” Specifically, each service area is divided into 12 sub-zones, and the back court is divided into eight such zones.”

According to O’Shannessy, this is just the start of where technology can take the sport.

Top 3

Top 3 is a publication where Medium writers support other Medium writers by promoting each other’s work. Medium members are encouraged to post three stories from other writers that they enjoyed reading.

Luka Leskovšek

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Top 3

Top 3

Top 3 is a publication where Medium writers support other Medium writers by promoting each other’s work. Medium members are encouraged to post three stories from other writers that they enjoyed reading.

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