72 best articles of 2024 for CTO and tech leaders

Dec 28 5 min read

Over 2024, I read ~300 articles and bookmarked even more.

My topics of interest cover everything CTOs, engineering managers, and tech leads deal with daily. How do I stay technical when I’m not wiring code anymore? How to balance the product priorities and the needs of different teams. How do other people solve the same challenges I’m facing now?

So I was reading a lot of useful newsletters (check them here if you wish) and saving blog posts I found practical for my needs. It ended up as a huge list of 72 articles that might be useful for others.

I sorted all articles by topic because there were so many of them, and I wanted to make it easier to read through them.

Engineering team culture

This section is my favorite and one of my biggest daily challenges. Team culture makes a safe space for productive collaboration, transparent communication, and better releases, as everyone is aligned towards the same engineering habits & practices. But how can we create such a culture among the engineers and cross-functional teams we work with? I learned a lot from experience shared in these articles:

Hiring and onboarding

You’ll find everything related to finding great engineers and building a friendly hiring process here. Tech hiring is not easy. Sometimes it can take months to fill some roles. It took me several months to find a frontend developer, backend developer, and QA for my team in Lemon.io.

When you finally find someone you like, you need to build onboarding and integrate new team members. If those topics are something you need advice on, these posts should be helpful:

Engineering approaches

In this section, you’ll find interesting guides on TDD, DevSecOps, refactoring practice, scaling infrastructure, and many tips on how other means set up the foundation for the engineering function. Many things from here will be useful for team leads as well:

Managing engineering teams

I’m a mix of introvert and extrovert, and I love to switch contexts. Actually, I can’t live without switching contexts, but a lot of us (technical people) are introverts, and people management is hard for us. Our energy level goes down from too many calls and tasks that require switching contexts. So we must learn to be introverted managers who support the team and have enough confidence to challenge people when needed. There are good directions to improve as a technical leader: