People will talk about the wage-price spiral (which has been demonstrated to be false), but they won’t talk so much about the herd behaviour at the higher echelons of our industry.
I’m thinking back about this past year and this has definitely not been a great year. On the other hand it’s also the first time in a while where I have mental capacity to spare to even think about something like a year in review.
Even a cursory dip into the subreddits and other social media posts, whitepapers, and other documentation and community discussions surrounding generative AI, makes it hard to miss the spite and negativity directed at human creativity. They are almost necessary preconditions to be part of the development community. Ironically, of course, the developers celebrate their own creativity in building these software tools, despite the fact that they implicitly rebuke the work and lives of everyone who creates or thinks meaning is confined to living things.
Looks like we can bootstrap a web app using pretty much only Postgres for the data layer and kick out the redis cluster, the celery process and the ElasticSearch server.
Lots of great ways to manage change in organizations. It’s a bunch of work to do this, but if you skip these steps, the results can and will backfire. I particularly like the guiding policy strategy where even if I don’t know something I can usually spitball the values and invariants of the situation that will fit the result.
The autofocus way of handling todos has a charm in that it treats your work as an endless stream and tries to take the negativity and failure out of it. I now am doing something quite similar by using Things as the river and dragging tasks into my calendar which has a natural limit to it.
Reading about China’s message board theorists is amazing and makes me wish I could have stuck with Chinese. But then again I would have not learned it well enough probably ever to be able to follow what’s happening on the Chinese internet, so this will have to do.
These days, “no one is taking any creative risk,”said Laura Mayer, a veteran podcast executive and producer who’s worked at several large publishers. “We’re seeing plenty of efforts to reverse-engineer what were successes in podcasting, and as a result, we get a lot of watered-down karaoke attempts at what worked out in the past.”
Seeing that Gitlab had published their TeamOps framework, I stayed up late to get my certification. I especially liked the recorded meetings with Sid Sijbrand and other Gitlab senior staff that they have published on YouTube.
Running multiple strategic tracks will set you up to dominate at a large scale, but many organizations can’t run one let alone run multiple at the same time. The visualization and plays as described here by Itamar Gilad look a lot like Wardley mapping.
Product sense (and taste) are so important but so hard to pinpoint and teach to others. Lenny here unpacks what goes into it but even then there are very few shortcuts to getting it.
A short guide of how a team can turn around the work they need to do on a legacy system and come out the better for it. I’ve seen lots of teams struggle with this but as described here a lot of it is in the approach and the praxis of doing it and working together.
Nice to read a project we worked on a long time ago (web application concept and initial set of user stories to hand off to development) is still going strong. This project and others like it support my thinking that it’s possible to solve problems definitely in a product agency context.
A relevant and nuanced complication of agile by Dorian Taylor seeing it as a trauma based response where the core practice has gotten stuck and is preventing the industry from solving more fundamental issues.
People see this kind of talk about self-governance and think there is no process or management in such a setup while usually there is more (and higher quality) than in a traditional organization. It’s also some of the best work you will ever do.
A lot of very uncomfortable questions in this list of staff engineering program dysfunctions. It seems this is quite widespread and we’re collectively figuring out how to shape this path.
Some ways to improve the quarterly prioritization tussle between engineering and business that focus on facilitating the conversation and reducing the number of things under immediate consideration.
Having seen lots of teams stuck in the two week agile rat race, a framework like Shape Up seems like it could offer a lot of benefits. But also just changing things up can’t hurt at that point. What is agility if not also being able to iterate on the way you work?
Good programmers will naturally start to abstract and develop a model that can do more work. But when this happens only in a technical setting, without collaboration with domain experts, the concepts are naive. That shallowness of knowledge produces software that does a basic job but lacks a deep connection to the domain expert’s way of thinking.
In dealing with the poverty that still plagued so much of the Indian populace, the Indian government had had to create electricity as fast as they could, and also, since they existed in a world run by the market, as cheaply as they could. Otherwise outside investors would not invest, because the rate of return would not be high enough. So they had burned coal, yes. Like everyone else had up until just a few years before. Now India was being told not to burn coal, when everyone else had finished burning enough of it to build up the capital to afford to shift to cleaner sources of power. India had been told to get better without any financial help to do so whatsoever. Told to tighten the belt and embrace austerity, and be the working class for the bourgeoisie of the developed world, and suffer in silence until better times came— but the better times could never come, that plan was shot. The deck had been stacked, the game was over. And now twenty million people were dead.
Any kind of workshop that you do virtually is going to be more difficult but in my experience a skilled facilitator and a motivated group can overcome these challenges.
I just watched and finished season 1 of Gibi which seems to have been enough of a success for them to quickly put out a second season. It’s a Turkish dark comedy show that you can watch online on Exxen. I already wrote it’s a bit like Seinfeld but with a very dark undercurrent.
I wrote before about how annoying it is if your Instagram username gets hacked and how difficult it is to get it back. I had to go to some lengths to get mine but nothing quite as much as this person.
But in the finals what distinguished one from another was all of the nonmusic stuff. The way they walked onto the stage, the cut of their clothes, the set of their shoulders, the spark in their eyes, and the emotion that played on their faces. All of these things established a mood either of tedium and awkwardness or of excited anticipation.
It’s important to insist, however, that to say that Muslims should go to Mecca for this reason isn’t to agree with Muslims. It is to give our reason for them to do something that they do for a different reason.
I get a bit of a chuckle thinking about the amount of C++ programmer hours that are being wasted here on this next generation car software. I’d love to learn about details when it comes to this.
An amazing tour de force compiling one of python’s core tools black to C using mypyc. There seems to be a lot of activity right now around compiling python code into different targets and also in distributing compiled binaries through python packages.
Lots of teams try to dogmatically implement scrum without looking at their team and goals. There are lots of alternative ways of doing things most of which will be more agile, not less.
It has been a while coming that for most workloads sqlite is more than good enough and at the same time also has a lot of operational benefits to offer. I never could believe all the hoops you have to jump through to get a postgres/mysql to run.
“Declaring a feature that’s in customers’ hands “done,”without monitoring, or with flaky tests, or tons of highly redundant code, or other obvious pending work, doesn’t magically get that work done. That work will always be there. It’ll just show up as surprises in your Maintenance Roadmap at an unknown date, when your team has mentally moved on and stopped thinking about the feature.”
