Five for Friday – September 1, 2023

I am almost completely recovered from my bout with coronavirus. Only thing remaining is a lingering cough, and that I now need about two more hours of sleep a night than I have in decades. I’m still planning a long hike in a few weeks, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. In the meantime, I’ve scoured the internet looking for the finest articles about stuff that I care about. Or, more likely, just some stuff I found that I thought was worth sharing.

  • This is going to be a quadruple link bullet post – but just in case you happened to miss it, McKinsey came out with a report on measuring developer productivity a few weeks ago. It’s umm…well anyway, Kent Beck and Gergely Orosz (from the pragmatic newsletter) wrote a pair of reaction posts (part 1, part 2) which are excellent – and then today, Brian Finster posted his thoughts. Read it all.
  • I like Python – and I know enough Python to do…simple things. But I ran across this WTF Python repo on github, and it’s been enlightening to learn a bit about a whole bunch of features and constructs that I am not familiar with.
  • I re-read Amy Edmondson’s The Fearless Organization every year or so, and always learn something new. I was thrilled to discover yesterday, that she has a new book coming out, The Right Kind of Wrong – which I’ve already pre-ordered. I reserve the right to bring it back to a FfF link after I read it.
  • My current team is fully remote (although I prefer the term, “location neutral”). My previous job was spread across more than a dozen offices, so it was practically remote as well. As such, I am always looking for ways to better connect teams who aren’t co-located, and ran across this great article on Building remote company culture with AI.
  • And to contrast that (sort of), this article on Remote Work – which makes the point for everyone going back to the office – but also recognizes that there are benefits on both sides of the RTO argument. I have my own opinions…that I’ll share eventually.

That’s it for another week – good to get two of these out in a row. See you in a week.

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