Sharing my experience as a lead

Experience as a lead

• humbling given the amount of coordination

• notes taking help a lot to keep track of priorities

• build trust with team members

• comes in handy when it comes to delegation

• what to expect ?

• what is expected from you ?

• humbling position

• details oriented

• self awareness and your surroundings

• everyone needs you

• keep priority tab to work only on meaningful task and delegate when you can

• your work starts when every else are not working

• bird eye view

• distribute the context. Redundant communication as the way to go

• about tech lead being ping all day

  • help hour for question that are less than 1-2 minutes
  • group quest ions to have a 15-30min session to go through your different issues
    • switch to something else unless you're totally blocked
  • interruptions kill focus, impact productivity

• Course correction

• when they fail you fail

• we win together

• touch base, stay on track

• you achieve through your teamates

  • deleguate to achieve more and help grow

• you lose touch with tech

• many many many meetings

• calendar block to protect your sanity or for uninterrupted work

• you can sometimes feel powerless. You are just involved not have the final word.

• Lead / manager is not for everyone

• Some folks prefer to just churns through tickets withtout a whole lot of overhead

My schedule as a Solutions architect

Hands on solutions architect role half leadership half coding

• research tickets
• troubleshoot ticket

Ceremonies

• Happy hours
  • Welcome & Check-in (5 min): Quick hellos and optional personal updates.
  • Wins & Highlights (10 min): Share recent successes or highlights from the week.
  • Help Corner (15 min): Open support for code help, troubleshooting, or rubberducking.
  • Pair Programming Round (10 min): Optional pairing for anyone who wants real-time coding support.
  • Random Topic (10 min): Fun or off-topic discussion to keep things light.
  • Wrap-Up & Team Pulse (5 min): Final thoughts and feedback.
  • Open Chat (Remaining Time): Free time to connect casually.

Daily Summary

2h of work hours 1h grooming: technical notes to tickets 1h Team sync, PR reviews 2h meetings 2h of non planned work 20m planning next day priority tasks

Plan 30m Catch up with conversations (email, teams)

1h PR review

1h Groom ticket

1h
Monitoring: sentry, performance with new relic

• team augmentation
• any DB query more than x
• any http request longer than 20s
• sentry errors monitoring 30
• work planned ahead / keep team busy
• team velocity monitoring 20
• PR review + testing 30-60
• exploration 30-60
• sentry errors monitoring
• review pending/newly closed PRs
• enroll support for UI/UX workflow (manual testing)
• plan for

Help hour

• optional
• pair programming with team, one sharing (
• increase team engagement and member
• help
• previous
• regroup before stand up next day
• still different lunch and learn)

Weekly 1h Sentry error monitoring New Relic Technical session

• after every other refinement

• project level monitoring

  • see monitoring

• monitor production errors/bugs/exceptions

  • when reproduction possible, file bug tickets if any
    • link or close issue on sentry

• Same as above for staging and dev

Playbooks

• CI test
• CI lint
• CI auto update composer
• CI auto nom audit fix
• deploy after build pass
  • allow override no matter build status
• upgrade / install
  • composer
  • npm
  • node
  • php
  • mysql

Productivity hacks

• work my meetings down up to have less void between meetings
• Mode of work
  • maker
    • operates in a 90min time block
    • avoid long break unless necessary
    • postpone any meeting or potentioal interruption to end of the block
  • manager
    • operates as 15min time block
    • back to back meeting with 5min break in between to allow prep and account for delays

References

• Your Team as a Distributed System • Andrew Harvey • YOW! 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjwwJbqB9qc