The two entities arguably most responsible for keeping Germany in the digital dark ages, the CSU and Telekom, have found each other.
Category: Strategy
Project Power
I think “Project-Power” from this newsletter by Adam Tooze is going to be a useful concept going forward:
A project in this sense is the historically specific, intentional mobilization of multiple resources around a significant objective on whose success and failure important things depend.
I’m struck mostly by how bad the German government is at this. Every part of the country seems to be fully paralysed.
So long Ribbonfarm!
Ribbonfarm retiring is another such ending in a time rife with them. I can’t overstate how influential it has been on my (our) thinking and practice. Tremendously impressive to think all of that was thought up by one person (who I still haven’t met).
It’d be impossible to summarise all the themes, intersections and other tidbits that I got out of Ribbonfarm. I can say how it begun: I was lying on the river-shore in Avignon in 2012 and I had a large part of the blog’s back catalog in my Instapaper and there I read the entire thing while listening to the crickets.
GitHub Copilot is like every Microsoft product. Everybody uses it because it comes bundled in their company contract but nobody likes it.
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
What this article says is true: The Fediverse is entirely inconsequential and you might as well pee into the wind as post on it. Nothing will happen.
The main reason I write anything there is just as a kind of personal life log. I don’t expect anybody to even see it.
Trying for years to explain to people that Germany has almost zero project power and is incapable of any progress and then suddenly a movement springs up that agrees entirely with that assessment.
Not sure if I should be pleased or miffed.
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.
That popular open source package managers will at some point all get owned is so inevitable that it’s hardly worth mentioning.
Cocoapods in this case is a bit of an outlier because the entire setup here has been so broken to begin with. iOS development never really allowed for dependency management so Cocoapods did it in an very hacky way and it was written in Ruby, a relatively niche end-of-life language that would have no chance to be blessed by Apple and shouldn’t be used for anything serious to begin with. (Don’t even get me started on Carthage.)
Swift Package Manager has been released years ago but lots of projects of course never manage to switch. I believe the best thing a project can do in such a situation is to terminate itself for the greater good.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/cocoapods_vulns_supply_chain_potential/
The end of free money has had a huge negative impact on open source. I agree with the author here, it would have been better to license everything under copy-left and see what happens.
The Netherlands is facing similar problems where depressed salaries, lack of housing and rampant overt racism are making it difficult to attract digital talent from all over the world.
You know, countries could have promoted STEM education as a pursuit decades ago but given the state of things, nothing is getting done in technology without people from outside of Europe. Let’s see whether we make the smart choice this time round, or whether we’ll see countries ‘cutting their nose to spite their face’ as the saying goes.
As somebody who dove pretty deep into how to run a creative agency in a way that’s innovative and goes against the grain, I really like what Village One here in Berlin are doing with their cooperative approach.
I’ll be following them closely and I hope they survive on their terms.
https://www.village.one/garden/library/what-is-a-cooperative
Last week I was making a presentation and I came across Deming and his principles. I have often gotten the question: “If you don’t measure X, then how will you know we’re doing well or improving?” which I always felt was misguided.
It turns out that Deming was way ahead of me there, he says: “Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.”
Leadership is always the key.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principles
It’s hard to believe that it’s going to cost €1.6B for Germany to hook up ChatGPT to their beloved fax machines.
Doing the things listed here as a VP by Emily Nakashima sounds all nice and well (maybe fun even for some people), but the core deliverables of alignment and focus are the real test: both are impossibly hard to achieve and worth their weight in gold.
It’s understandable that organizations try to make their word legible and simplify things. In fact, it’s one of the reasons for the organizational boundary.
The problem is that monoprocess pretty much entirely does not work for any creative/agile endeavour. Things are valuable exactly because they are complicated and messy.
A nice article about Box’s transformation and especially that chart contrasting burn v. growth is one of the most important things for any startup to keep in mind.
We’ve mapped our metrics and levers in Double Loop as a platform org and are now seeing this approach spread through the company.
Daniel explains here how you can use their tool to operationalize strategy and systems thinking.
https://blog.doubleloop.app/strategy-systems-thinking-and-being-wrong/