Images of leadership, IaC, and an in-person interview 💡
Monday Ideas — Edition #168
1) 🏐 Tired of Cursor bouncing between dead ends?
This is brought to you by today’s sponsor, Unblocked!
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I am personally a big fan of Unblocked — it’s one of the tools I recommend the most these days. You can learn more below! 👇
2) 🪞 The Four Images of Leadership
Two months ago we published an incredible article by Thiago Ghisi about Engineering Manager Archetypes.
One of the things I love the most about Thiago’s piece is that it builds on research that goes well beyond engineering. One of the references I love the most is “The Archetypal Images of Leadership” by Shirshendu Pandey, which is built on Jungian theory and organizational psychology, proposing four archetypal leader images:
🔒 Administrator — focused on maintenance and functioning, through stability and security.
🪴 Guide — focused on humanistic growth and supporting others, through affiliation and bonding.
🏆 Achiever — focused on victory and success, through sheer drive and achievement.
🔋 Catalyst — focused on transformation and innovation, through inspiration and engagement.
This study speaks to our unconscious projections: how people naturally see leaders, not just how leaders label themselves.
There are other, related, archetypical models, which build on similar principles:
Eight Archetypes of Leadership — by Manfred Kets de Vries’, which identifies Strategists, Change-Catalysts, Transactors, and more.
Competing Values Framework — from Robert Quinn, which maps cultural archetypes (like Producer, Mentor, Innovator) to organizational behavior.
What all these models have in common is they focus on how leaders drive impact.
Behaviors like driving change, hardening processes, or nurturing people development feel like core modes of operation, rather than skills or tasks.
Thiago then took this approach and tailored it to the tech industry dynamics — like scaling teams, product iterations, or the nuanced split between hands-on engineering and strategic alignment.
You can check out the full piece below 👇
3) 🏗️ Infrastructure as Code is a no-brainer with AI
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of provisioning infra through code instead of manual processes (i.e. clicking around in cloud consoles).
IaC has (always had) overwhelming benefits:
🪄 Reproducibility — infra can be created, destroyed, and recreated consistently across envs.
↩️ Version control — infra changes get tracked just like application code.
🤖 Automation — reduces human error and speeds up deployment.
📑 Self-documentation — the code itself documents what infra exists and how it's configured.
These benefits have existed for a long time, at the expense of some additional config work upfront. The factor that heavily tips the scale today is, unsurprisingly, AI.
AI is good at understanding and generating infrastructure code. This means you can describe what you want in plain English, and AI can help generate the corresponding infrastructure code.
The most used tools for this are Terraform and Ansible:
Terraform — is the gold standard for cloud-agnostic infrastructure provisioning. It allows you to define what should exist (VMs, networks, databases) in declarative fashion, and it maintains state to track and manage these resources over time.
Ansible — configures systems and deploys applications using procedural, stateless automation. It is YAML-based and allows you to install software, manage configurations, and run tasks on infrastructure that already exists.
So, Terraform and Ansible are complementary: the former builds the environment, and the latter sets it up.
We documented more good techniques that you may want to pick up this year in our yearly tech radar 👇
4) 📺 My Interview at Cosa Sposta!
When Giulio first reached out a couple of months ago and proposed me to chat on his podcast I declined, because I was super swamped with work.
So he said something unexpected: “what if I come to your place?!”
And that sold it to me. There is a magic in having in-person conversations that remote can’t replicate (trust me, I run a remote podcast!).
Now the interview is out and I am so grateful for it. It is probably the best one I ever had, also thanks to Giulio’s thorough prep 🙏
If you want to learn more about Refactoring, my thoughts on productivity, purpose, side projects, and… sim racing, you can find our chat below 👇
And that’s it for today! If you are finding this newsletter valuable, consider doing any of these:
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I wish you a great week! ☀️
Luca