Category: All Posts

Short work week this week, but I still found a few things worth sharing – but to be honest, I’ve watched 6-8 hours of world cup soccer every day this week (and will continue for the next few days until I only watch 4 hours a day).

• We can lead with the thing that gives me great joy every 4 years – the World Cup. I found an interesting article on predicting the world cup winners in python. Too early to know if it’s right or not, but (spoiler alert) I could have predicted France and Brazil as likely finalists without writing any code at all.
• Other than watching world cup, eating, and sleeping the only other thing I’ve done over the past few days is read Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri. It’s been on my Kindle for a while – and I’m bummed I waited to read it. It is so freaking good – and it made me realize how much good Product Management aligns with the Modern Testing Principles (likely more on that in the next AB Testing Podcast)
• CNN did a nice article on what we’re doing with live sports at Unity. Sport like you’ve never seen it before.
• In this week’s installment of “how bad is the twitter dumpster fire”, there’s this post – Why Twitter Didn’t Go Down: From a Real Twitter SRE
• I’ve been trying to catch up on my backlog of podcasts. I’m a huge fan of the Smartless podcast – the hosts are funny, but they have fantastic guests. A few weeks ago, Joe Biden was on the show. For the haters out there who may read my blog, I suggest you give it a listen. He’s smart, witty, and gives a pretty damn good interview.

That’s all I have. Time to go to bed so I can get up at 2:00am for Tunisia vs. Australia.

Time is a blur. I know today is Friday, because todoist reminded me to post a FfF post – something I recently realized I’ve done for over 5 years now. That’s like….math…a bunch of links. Hopefully you found a few of these helpful, interesting, or worth reading. Here’s this week’s batch.

• What’s happening at twitter right now is amazing. And by amazing, I mean holy-fuck-balls-what-a-disaster. A little off the beaten path, but related, here is an impossible to pass quiz on Who Said It: Elon Musk or Mr. Burns?
• Speaking dumpster fires, here’s one of a million articles this week pointing out the utter failure of Ticketmaster to do the only thing it exists to do (besides extorting millions of dollars from music and sports fans)
• Mike Cohn hasn’t been mentioned here in a minute, but as usual, he’s written a completely sensible and sort of necessary post on Epics, Features and User Stories
• I have been saying for (some time I don’t know, because time is a blur) that DORA metrics can apply to mobile or desktop software as well (with minor adjustments). Because I’m too lazy to write more than that, here’s an article on How to apply DORA metrics for mobile development
• What is bigger: A ronna or a quetta? I don’t know either, but people still discuss shit like this, and I oddly find it interesting.

That’s all for this week – and probably next week too. With American Thanksgiving, I will probably forget that Friday is Friday, but we’ll see what happens. Talk at me on twitter if you have questions.

Yesterday was a bit of a blur, and FfF fell off the map. But – as has happened (at least) once before, the Saturday makeup is a six-pack of interesting things that I think you may find interesting as well.

• You have to check out Programming Helper – you type (in english) what you want to do, and it generates code in the language of your choice. It works remarkably well – even on more complex ideas.
• A wonderful article from The Atlantic on What Managers Can Do About Burnout
• A colleague shared this great article from Rob Lambert on prioritization – If we’re doing this, we’re not doing that
• Back when I was writing more, I remember reading advice that said (paraphrased), “Every time you want to use the word ‘very’ in your writing, replace it with ‘damn’. That way your editor will remove it for you”. This is still good advice, but if you want to choose an even better adjective, try out this site that helps you lose the very
• I don’t point y’all to podcasts very often, but the recent Dev Interrupted podcast w/ Charity Majors was very good marvelous
• It’s no secret that Twitter is a mess right now. For any Twitter employees reading this, my heart goes out to you. While there’s no single article that can sum up with chaos, my personal favorite is this collection of the 7 funniest imposter tweets from Twitter’s check mark fiasco

Thanks for your patience (and thanks for reading). See you next week.

We’re a few weeks into what is usually 6 months of wind and rain in the pacific northwest, but hopefully it will help get the fires put out. Here are a few links I found this week that I felt like sharing.

• Janet Gregory and Selena Delesie just released their book on Assessing Agile Quality Practices with QPAM. I had a chance to pre-read it, and it’s excellent.
• I thought this article on Four ways to protect yourself from burnout was helpful.
• One of my teammates shared this article on The Three Tech Projects You Meet in Hell – and it’s excellent.
• I am reading, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent. I read Sarah Kendzior’s previous book as well, and this one is also well written, hard hitting, and slightly depressing.
• I thought these cheat sheets printed onto PCBs were kind of cool. I may get one for myself.

I hope you have a good weekend and week. See you in 7 days.

Not a bad week – not a great week – but it was a week. Here are some things new to me that you may like.

• I’ve talked (I think) about Pat Lencioni’s idea of Working Genius before, but the book arrived recently, and I read the entire thing in two sittings. Business fables aren’t for everyone, but I love the genre, and think Lencioni is onto something great here.
• I loved this article on How to Encourage Your Team to Give You Honest Feedback – great information for any leader.
• This is a great post from Maaret Pyhäjärvi on How to Maximize the Need for Testers (/s)
• I love to see the Modern Testing Principles in action – Vernon Richards just shared 9 Perspectives Testers Can Use To Understand Their Quality Culture
• Someone always messes up the good stuff – Sysdig TRT uncovers massive cryptomining operation leveraging GitHub Actions

That’s all I have – I’ll try it again next week.

We have made it to another Friday. Air quality in the bright green pacific northwest got to pretty unhealthy levels this week, but it’s better (finally) today. I feel like I’ve been licking a dustpan. On the times when i could see my computer screen through the haze, here’s what I found this week.

• First off – big news this week is that the Midnights dropped this week. You know you want to listen…
  Who am I kidding – you’re probably already on your 20th playthrough.
• Not a new article, but new to me – I am faaaar from an Amazon fanboy, but they get a few things right, and I think their planning process is one of them.
• So, ummm…speaking of companies that I don’t admire completely, but that I’m willing to call out the good stuff, Satya continues to do and say good things for Microsoft (now if he only could clean out the old guard). Microsoft’s remote-work-friendly CEO puts his finger on the big problem with working from home.
• I just found about FutureForum.com this week – but the research there is amaze-balls. Check out this research (that underscores Satya’s points as well)
• Shit – number 5 already? Well, I can’t supply nothing but love for the big guys, so I’ll just mention that people are pretty pissed that the GitHub AI bot has used their code. GitHub Users Want to Sue Microsoft For Training an AI Tool With Their Code.

Have a great week – see you in seven days.

I’m tired, so that must mean it’s Friday again. Here are a few things I think are worth sharing.

• Speaking of tired, I don’t think I ever shared this burnout quiz from Yerbo. It tells me that I’m tired, but not burnt out, which feels about right. Also note that as of the time I’m writing this, the results page is 404ing, but that may be just me.
• I’m in a constant quest for the perfect (for me) note taking app. I tried Obsidian a year (ish) ago, and it worked pretty well, but getting it to sync properly between my laptop and phone was a pain. But – I played with SyncThing, and I’m pretty happy so far. Obsidian uses plain markdown, so it’s lightweight and does just about everything I need it to.
• A head-nodder of an article on more stuff people screw up – Why is being “Done” in Agile teams so tragically misunderstood?
• Yet another article from LeadDev (and from Abi Noda) that’s relevant to me, at least. What is a developer experience team?
• I am currently reading Build Better Teams by George Karseras. It is based on well-organized research, and brings together a lot of leadership and team building knowledge that is critical for leaders to understand.

And that’s it for another week. See you In Only Seven Days.

It’s Friday again already, and the end of 2022 is in sight. As usual (and expected), here are a few interesting things I found worth sharing.

• Feedback is something I’m always working on improving. This article really nails home some of the nuance needed for effective feedback.
• Speaking of good advice, this article on 16 Tendencies that Will Derail Your Career is also well worth the read.
• I like articles that make me think about things I’ve never thought about before. This article on Questioning vs. Asking is one of those.
• Don’t know how anyone could have missed this, but Biden finally pardoned people convicted of marijuana possession.
• I’ve been known to be pessimistic sometimes. One thought I frequently have given all of the security breaches and vulnerabilities is that nothing on the internet is actually secure. For example, The Majority of PostgreSQL Servers on the Internet are Insecure.

That’s it for this week. I’m going to try to get out in the mountains again this weekend (if the smoke doesn’t keep me away), but do whatever you need to do to disconnect and get ready for yet another week.

So yeah – I skipped last week…and some people actually noticed! Last week was a tough week, and although I had a few links ready, I just wanted to unplug and spend some time away from my computer – you know how it can get. The good news is that I am in a much better mood this week, and I have a few interesting (to me, at least) things to share.

• I want to lead off by sharing a post from Anne-Marie Charrett that could not have been easy to write – but that is so critically important that she did. Dictator or Liberator
• I have a lot of meetings. 98% of those meetings are an excellent use of my time. I have one of the 2% meetings coming up, so I’m thinking of forwarding this article on Seven tips on how to run a meeting that people will actually like
• Despite the fact that my meetings are generally good – I’m still trying to make more of them async. This article from Doist on How to Move Your Team Toward Async-First Communication is wonderful.
• The latest Leading in Tech newsletter has a great article on how to Eliminate toil and give way to the team that I think is worth reading.
• You may think I promote every Michael Lopp (aka Rands) on FfF, but I purposely refrain so I don’t come across as a fan-boy. However… The Coach and the Fixer is worth sharing no matter what.

That’s five if I counted correctly, so while I could have done a Ten for Thursday, or something similar, I’ll stop at five and promise that I’ll do my best to find five more next week. Take care of yourselves, and have a good weekend.

This has been a long week – but I still found a few things worth sharing. Here they are.

• I think this is a must read article on The Career, Accomplishments, and Impact of Richard I. Cook
• I also enjoyed this article on The Real Difficulty of Engineering Leadership
• In today’s news, I was fascinated by just about everything in the incident today: Uber apparently hacked by teen, employees thought it was a joke
• For anyone who has ever fallen down a wikipedia rabbit hole, wikipedia speed runs is a fun way to gamify this experience
• I hiked The Enchantments last weekend, and it was amazing. A few pictures of my adventure are below.

That’s it for this week – see you in another 7 days.