Work – Page 3 – alper.nl

As somebody working in platform for the past years, I’ve become very familiar with the different dimensions of this debate around productivity and John here unpacks the topic in a way that’s really useful. I used the nails analogy just yesterday.

Even more than a nuanced understanding of why developer productivity is so challenging to improve, the last bit of the piece is even more on the money because it’s what drives decision making in most companies (tech companies are no exception):

“Can you imagine how hard it would be to walk into a meeting with investors, whoever, and say, ‘um, you thought you had a 30mpg car, and it is a 15mpg car?”

https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-304-losing-a-day-a-week-to-inefficiencies

AI has democratised creating startups to the point where people really don’t have to do anything anymore.

Y Combinator is being criticized after it backed an AI startup that admits it basically cloned another AI startup

After watching the misery around python packaging for years, it’s good to see a bunch of movement in this space and with uv potentially something like a clear winner. That winner should take all and this problem can be solved for the foreseeable future.

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/8/21/harvest-season/

I don’t agree that naming is that hard but I do agree with Steve Klabnik here that we should avoid redundant naming if at all possible. Say on Github I have to describe my commit, name my branch and then also title my Pull Request. It’s a bit much.

https://steveklabnik.com/writing/against-names/

Always nice to be able to write stuff that the team has been doing and share it with the world.

Kubernetes is a very maligned technology but if properly managed it can be part of an entirely boring infrastructure portfolio. Realistically it’s not doing that much more than running docker on a bunch of machines and pulling images. React has a similarly bad reputation which is not stopping lots of developers from getting tons of work done with it.

https://choco.com/us/stories/life-at-choco/journey-to-kubernetes

Good advice that’s not only relevant to executives. Just answer the question!

The One Key to Dealing with Senior Executives: Answer the Question!

This is a good guide how to deal with underperformers by Jack Danger and it’s written more thoughtfully than 90% of the management writing out there.

https://jackdanger.com/managing-underperformers/

You start out writing a small flask app that gets a bunch of traffic, then rewrite it in an afternoon and then look at this: “The site was rock-solid after the go rewrite.”

I love real world scaling stories like this one.

https://eieio.games/essays/scaling-one-million-checkboxes/

The thing that Bert is not getting here is that Gaia-X is meant to be a distraction and not much else (that “else” would be politically far too risky to act upon). That’s the way these kind of things work. Meanwhile Europe will remain without its own cloud.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-distraction/

Logitech already has a forever mouse. No need for an MBA CEO to reinvent the wheel.

The G500s I bought in 2013 is still going strong, the only thing that’s missing is updated and functioning software to go with it. Logitech’s own driver offering was always absurdly bloated and after a couple of years dropped support for this particular model.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/logitech-has-an-idea-for-a-forever-mouse-thatrequires-a-subscription/