bookmark_borderFive for Friday – November 25, 2022

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.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – November 18, 2022

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.

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.

bookmark_borderSix for Saturday – November 12, 2022

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.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – November 4, 2022

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.

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

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – October 28, 2022

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

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

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – October 21, 2022

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.

Have a great week – see you in seven days.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – October 14, 2022

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.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – October 7, 2022

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.

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.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – September 30, 2022

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.

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.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – September 16

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

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