Images Of Leadership Iac And An In Person Interview
Hey, Luca here, welcome to a new edition of Refactoring! Every week you get:
Here are the latest editions you may have missed: To access all our articles, library, and community, subscribe to the paid version: 1) 🏐 Tired of Cursor bouncing between dead ends?This is brought to you by today’s sponsor, Unblocked! Unblocked’s MCP server gives your AI-powered IDE’s the missing context from tools like Slack, Confluence, and Jira, so they generate usable code the first time. 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 LeadershipTwo 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:
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:
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 AIInfrastructure 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:
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:
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. And that’s it for today! If you are finding this newsletter valuable, consider doing any of these: 1) 🔒 Subscribe to the full version — if you aren’t already, consider becoming a paid subscriber. 1700+ engineers and managers have joined already! Learn more about the benefits of the paid plan here. 2) 📣 Advertise with us — we are always looking for great products that we can recommend to our readers. If you are interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers, and engineers, you may want to advertise with us 👇 If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! I wish you a great week! ☀️ Luca |




