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Well this is weird. Due to some other appointments, I am writing this from a Unity Office. It’s been just under two years since I’ve worked from an office, and…I’m just not sure what to make of it. Anyway – here’s some stuff to read while I ponder this strange setting.

• Cool article from the backstage team on measuring productivity (my fave – days to 10th PR)
• While I’m plugging vendors, github also have a nice article (presentation?) this week on Writing and Shipping Code Faster
• This article captures (at a extremely high level), planning processes at some major companies. Not enough here to take any action, but I still found it interesting.
• Happy to see that a lot of companies (including Unity!) are embracing a hybrid model allowing flexibility in returning to work…someday. The Apple hybrid model has had a lot of press this week, but I’m not really impressed (4 weeks of wfh/remote, but still required days in the office) – I think it’s too much.
• In my opinion, there haven’t been nearly enough convictions in the aftermath of January 6 (especially at the politician level), but at least one of the terrorists has has plead guilty and sentenced.

Another week that was just a bit too busy for me. Here’s some stuff I found – once again – worth giving a read.

• I’m super-excited to have Weta join Unity
• An interesting look, although unsurprising, at the former presidents’s view of the January 6 insurrection.
• This is a fascinating article on how Slack changed Apple.
• I also enjoyed this article on measuring software development
• I love articles discussing learning from incidents. This is a great writeup from skyscanner.

That’s all – short and sweet. We’ll see what happens next week.

How in the hell is it November already – again? It’s time for your weekly peak into my open tabs.

• Angela Riggs wrote a nice article on how to write better goals
• Jeli wrote about a case study they did with us at Unity.
• Along those lines, I found out this week that Verica collate a list of industry incident reports
• I found myself nodding and smiling as I read this article on making learning a daily routine
• And finally, for those of you who do k8s, this GKE image streaming from Google looks pretty cool

That’s all I have for this week – or as many as I could post before I ran out of fingers to count them on. We’ll see what I find next week.

Hi again everyone – here are a few links I found this week that I like.

• I’m reading Unleashed, by Francis Frei and Anne Morriss and enjoying it a lot as it has some good advice on leadership
• This is a great article on best practices on post-mortems and incident review.
• Speaking of incidents – here’s an article on what makes shallow incident data “shallow”
• Apparently, a lot of us may have been “hacking websites” for a long time. Just in case you happened to miss this bit of news, viewing website HTML code is not illegal or hacking
• Finally – this bit on DevOps from Emily Freeman is just fucking fantastic

Hope you found something you liked – if not, hey, it’s free.

My day job is busier than normal these days, so this week flew by. A few interesting articles dropped into my view – maybe you’ll find them interesting as well.

• Self plug time – Unity Gaming Services are now available – a lot of folks on my team were an integral part of making this happen.
• If you are familiar with NPS (Net Promoter Score), you probably already know that it comes with pros and cons. Here’s a bit of how NPS can grow with NPS 3.0
• I enjoyed this article on how to learn the Feynman way (tl;dr – learn it well enough that you could explain it to anyone).
• Oh sorry – another HBR article. If you’re not a member, either join, or use an incognito/private window. This article on 5 Things High Performing Teams do Differently kicks ass
• I like it when companies are transparent with their outages and errors. Too often (like this article), we gloss over the learning opportunity by referring to a operational mistake as a “server glitch”

That’s all I have this week – thanks for reading yet again.

Hey everyone – it’s me again with some stuff I liked from the Internet this week

• This is an interesting article on pay cuts for fully remote work
• I’m disappointed we haven’t seen a whole lot more follow up from the January 6 insurrection, but at least there’s something
• Ever wonder what writing looks like with the letters removed? Me neither, but I still found this article on what text looks like with only punctuation fascinating.
• Camille Fournier always writes good stuff. Like this article on How New Managers Fail Individual Contributors.
• And a nice article on assessing Burnout (or something else)

That’s all this week (sorry for the heavier than normal Medium load). See you next week

Back for another week full of random links from everyone’s second favorite mad rodent.

• It’s no secret that I think no-code solutions for UI automation is the only viable path. Autify is one of my favorite companies in this space – and now they can afford to do even more.
• My newfound love of Ted Lasso isn’t just a “me” thing. Here’s how to lead like Ted.
• As a lot of workforces go “fully remote”, pay is becoming a thing. Personally, I am on the side of paying people equally no matter where they are (and yes, I realize the complexities this can bring). Here’s an article on how this is changing.
• Here’s a two-fer on the topic of incidents and learning. Here’s a brief summary of Facebook’s recent outage – and some horror on twitter about Twitch.
• I think I’m a hypocrite. I hate Facebook, but love my Oculus (although I only play Elven Table Tennis). While I try to balance this inner battle, here’s a story about a bit of ingenuity to make Facebook less of a shit-hole.

That’s all for this week. Feeling cute – may record a podcast later.

We made it through another week. Sort of. Between this, that, and some really gnarly other stuff, here are a few links I found that you may find interesting as well.

• In teams I lead, I do as much as I can to ensure a culture of transparency, accountability, and psychological safety. As such, I’m always interested in articles and research like this, that discuss workplace toxicity
• The PNSQC Conference Program is out. This has always been one of my favorite conferences for discussing Quality (and not just testing). It’s worth checking out.
• I’ve been re-reading this article on self-service models for platform teams, and like a lot of what it has to say.
• This article on teams as networks resonated a lot with me as well.
• I’m probably behind a lot of you, but I just discovered ohmyzsh and it’s made my mac terminal a lot more fun.

That’s all 5 for this week – I’ll try it again in a week.

Back for another week of random links and interesting articles from the internet.

• For the ‘murican readers here, the US Vaccine Tracker is a nice look at vaccine rates across a variety of demographics.
• A great article on metrics that don’t suck from Greg Paciga
• Just this week, I was in a conversation about automating development environment setups…and then I also run into this article on the subject (and a pointer to gitpod).
• It’s been a while since I’ve pointed to the Netflix Tech blog, but there’s a nice article on A/B testing (with the slash) this week.
• Finally – I found this article on how the new generation of college students thinks about files and folders fascinating. If you’re my age, you may find it interesting too.

See you next week.

Because more than ever, all I do is what my calendar and Todoist tell me to do, it’s time for me to spit out. a few things I liked this week from the internet.

• ICYMI, I wrote an article about me kicking the tires with PractiTest
• A colleague at work shared this article on Hiring a Foundations Engineering Leader
• In the “I’m not sure this needed to happen” category – Fortran.io
• Anyone who has worked on software knows this secret. You Cannot Create Software Without Bugs, Problems and Mistakes
• I’m a big fan of Julie Zhou’s book (Making of a Manager), and I really liked this article based on responses to a tweet asking, What’s the Best Thing a Manager has Ever Done for You?

I hope you found something you like – see you next week.