Here are your picks for this week:
Process makes perfect
Despite how hectic, chaotic and short-termist life in a startup can feel, there ought to be a time and place to step back, take a bit of perspective and think about the longer term.
A good way to practice this is to have regular (quarterly, annual) planning sessions, and this article from First Round Review offers a sensible framework for a planning exercise.
While the article is rather thorough, planning doesn’t need to be a time-consuming effort, especially for a smaller startup. But following the 4 key stages of Context, Plans, Integration and Buy-in really makes sense.
If it ain’t code, don’t fix it
It’s been pretty fascinating to see serverless computing become increasingly common over the last few years.
Here is a short overview (and a simple example) of the latest addition to Amazon’s Lambda service: Lambda@Edge. Nice stuff.
Something to try
A thought which I keep coming across, but is very well summarised below…
Hitting an obstacle often makes the obstacle look more important than it really is... “How can I finally optimise this code by 50%?”
Instead of trying to break through it, ask yourself if you’re trying to tackle the right problem: is there a bigger (and more exciting, even easier?) problem to take on instead, ie “How would I improve this whole component 10x”?
I hope you enjoyed this. Have a great week!
Fabrice
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Hand-picked by Fabrice, a UK-based consulting CTO. Let me know if you need help with your startup!