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I don’t know how many FfFs I’ve posted now, but it’s been a fun habit. Every week, I hear of at least one person who finds something interesting in what I find in corners of the internet. Here’s to hoping that this week has the same results.

• In an article highly related to a lot of us over the last two years, this article on why your workcation is probably harmless has a lot of good information on working away from home
• This is an interesting article on Leadership Styles from the 10x leadership blog
• I thought this was a good article on SRE responsibilities
• One of my guilty pleasures over the past years have been the Jack Reacher novels. Now, we finally have a decent Reacher character on the screen.
• And finally, in an article painful to read, Peloton is kicking employees while they’re down and giving away a 1-year free subscription to everyone they fire.

I hope your weekend goes well. See ya’ in a week.

Someone told me this week they read my blog. That’s cool, and I hope they find it valuable, but this is less of a blog, and more of a place for me to dump some things that I think are interesting or worth reading. Whatever the reason you’re here, thanks for dropping by.

Here’s the random info I found this week.

• Charity Majors has another gem of an article on How can you tell if the company you’re interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
• I fell into watching Ozark on Netflix last weekend. I didn’t know what to expect, but I’m liking it a lot.
• Part of the reason I like it is Jason Bateman’s performance (hard to believe he’s outshining Justine!). I’m a huge fan of the podcast – Smartless – that he hosts with Will Arnette and Sean Hayes. It’s worth checking out.
• This is sort of several links in one. This post from Jamie Lawrence on The Manager’s Stack has some great links.
• Finally, a great article from HBR on managing a hybrid workforce

Hope you find at least one of these interesting or useful. If not, there’s always next week. Stay safe out there.

We’ve burned through a month of 2022 already. Here’s some stuff to look at going into month 2.

• I came across this article on balancing work on engineering teams that aligns a lot with my thinking
• I probably mentioned this before, but I just re-read Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager, which I probably once again will recommend as a must read for new (or newish) managers
• Speaking of managers, Angela Riggs has some great tips in this post on Staying Organized as a Manager
• I picked up a new mouse this week, and I’m pretty happy with it. I got the Logitech MX Master 3 – it feels good in my hand, and has a reasonable amount of customization available
• If you had fun with Wordle last week, the less strategic Letterle is also available – or for more fun, Absurdle

That’s it – hope you find something interesting or new. Have a good weekend, and stay safe.

Friday again – with Monday off, I had a week’s worth of meetings shoved into 4 days – but now it’s time to rest for a few days and finally watch the latest season of Cobra Kai on Netflix. But first – here are a few interesting links I found.

• First – if you haven’t already, go get your free covid tests (and get vaccinated and boosted too!)
• I finally finished a project that I started a year ago – then left alone for a year. I used a raspberry pie to connect my turntable to my sonos system. I used this guide – which installs the full OS rather than a headless version, but it seemed to work fine, and I had enough storage on the pi to make it work
• I really like Chris Fenning’s work, and his recent article on 15 Essential Communication Skills You Need At Work has a whole lot of head-nodders from me
• New Dollyrots album is out – it’s a collection of b-sides and non-album tracks, but it has a lot of my favorites on it. The covers of Dancing with Myself and Breed are excellent, and I’m really loving tracks like Cloud Ten
• Full disclaimer – I own about $50 worth of cryptocurrency that I purchased as an experiment. I’ll let y’all know when I’m a zillionaire. Related – in something everyone could have predicted, El Salvador’s plans to run the nation on crypto isn’t going too well.

And now it’s the weekend. Have a fun and safe weekend and take care of yourselves. See you next week.

Happy Friday! Here are a few interesting things I found this week.

• If you have somehow missed it, the word game wordle is fun, quick, and popular. I’ve played it about 20 times so far, and have managed to guess the word every time.
• If you enjoy wordle, and like mucking with stuff at the command line, then this article on solving wordle will be interesting as well
• I enjoyed this article on the rules of engagement in a remote/hybrid world.
• The folks at manomano are back with another great article on the quality craft
• I watched all of Station Eleven last week, and really liked it. It’s a little weird at times, but really woven together nicely.

That’s it for this week. Have a good weekend, and stay safe.

Oh my – it’s been a while, hasn’t it. I had a good time off – in that I did nothing except play some games and read and sleep for almost 3 weeks.

Here are a few things worth sharing.

• One book I read was Hacking Growth – which is an odd title for a book that reminded me a lot of the Lean Startup in places. If your team doesn’t use customer metrics to figure out if they’re building the right thing, I think it’s a must read – and an interesting read for everyone.
• Somehow, I just discovered Koolaid Factory. It’s a site filled with a crap ton of web zines about how organizations work. I can’t get enough of it.
• I love everything Cindy Sridharan writes – she just doesn’t write often enough. Her latest article on how to become a more effective engineer is worth every minute it takes to read.
• Great article on Courageous Leaders (hint – transparency and humility are part of the equation)
• After I post this, I’m going to play just a little more Halo Infinite. I finished the main campaign during my vacation, and I’m still interested enough to poke around and find the collectibles. To me, the story was far better than the game play, but I was able to power through on Normal without getting too frustrated.

See you next week – stay safe out there.

This is the last FfF for 2021 – I’m going to take a few weeks with as little computer time as possible. I’ll be playing Halo Infinite and Fallout 4, reading some of my kindle backlog, and keeping up with new episodes of Hawkeye, The Expanse, and Wheel of Time.

In the meantime – here are some links you may have missed.

• I’m giving a webinar in January on moving past Modern Testing. You can register here.
• This article on Why Intuitive Troubleshooting Has Stopped Working for You hits so many things right on the head with the challenges in diagnosing errors in distributed systems.
• A(nother) great article from Chris Denning on 3 Warning Signs you aren’t communicating well with executives
• If you’re curious about the right way to use OKRs, Christina Wodtke’s Radical Focus is a wonderful book for this. Her recent blog post on the topic is a great addition to her work and recommended.
• Want to know more about Web3? Here’s some good background to start with. The Web3 fraud.

Thanks for reading – see you all in 2022.

We made it to the end of another week – and almost to the end of another year. Here are a few things I found interesting this week.

• Love this article on No More Quality Assurance @ Manomano
• I also really enjoyed this article on Milestones, not Projects
• This article is equally interesting – Faster and More Predictable
• Here’s an all-too-true story of Signs You’re Doing OKRs Wrong
• And finally, I liked this article about The Dream Job Has Lost Its Luster

That’s it – hope you find something interesting.

Happy Friday – if you didn’t know, today is the birthday of rockstars like Ozzy Osborne and Nicole Forsgren. Here’s some other stuff you probably didn’t know.

• It’s Advent of Code time!
• I enjoyed this short article on Demystifying DevOps from Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
• I love the thinking that Anne-Marie Charrett is putting into test coaching – here’s the latest example
• A lot of great ideas on holding Virtual Offsites from GitHub
• Speaking of GitHub – nice concise write up here on their recent outage

It’s Thanksgiving in the US – well, yesterday was. Instead of links this week, I’d like to share 5 things I’m thankful for.

• I’m thankful for Brent Jensen for dealing with my crap on the AB Testing podcast. Those bi-weekly discussions have helped me work through a lot of questions over the years, and I’m still amazed that all 3 listeners seem to enjoy our rants.
• I’m thankful to the folks on Twitter and LinkedIn who challenge me, disagree with me, and make me think about where I stand. As you all know, some of my principles are bread and butter to some – but ridiculously stupid to others, and hearing from both sides helps me refine and grow
• Believe it or not, I’m thankful for Slack, Discord, Zoom, and all of the other tools that have helped me stay connected with colleagues and family over the last year and a half. I can’t imagine what the pandemic would have been like 20 years ago.
• I’m thankful for Instacart – it seems extravagant, but having my groceries delivered – even now when I feel a bit safer going to the store is a huge time save for me and well worth the delivery cost and extravagant tips I leave.
• Finally, I’m thankful to Unity for giving a much better work experience than I ever had before, and for trusting me to be the type of leader that I want to be – and for handling the WFH experience as well as I could ever expect.

I hope the US readers all have a great long weekend, and that everyone in the rest of the world enjoyed the quiet communication over the last few days.