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I’m back after an interesting walk in the woods (more on that – probably – in my angryweasel.substack.com post tomorrow). In the meantime, here are a few things I found interesting recently.

• Mark Shand wrote a nice article on Transforming Quality Culture. I like that Mark draws ideas from a variety of sources – definitely worth a read.
• I interviewed Danny Faught four years ago, and he shared some interesting reflections in this post.
• I enjoyed this article on Coaching Beyond the Questions
• Someone followed up on something I’ve often wondered while flying…you, ahem, should probably never do what’s documented here, but it’s a good read anyway. PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights
• Finally, for those of you also fascinated by how fast computers can be, New quantum computer record smashes Google supremacy by 100 folds

That’s all for this week – thanks for reading.

The first half of the year comes to a close, and I have five more things to share.

• It’s been a while since I linked to a Mike Cohn article, but his post this week asking if Agile and Scrum are dead is full of good points.
• This article – Mental Well-being and Productivity in Tech: Survey Results isn’t particularly surprising – but it is interesting.
• I came across Prefect this week, and it looks super-interesting. Github link is here as well if you want to dive in quickly. I feel like this is a thing that a lot of orgs need – but don’t know they need.
• I’m hiking a chunk of the Pacific Crest Trail next week, and have found the PCT Interactive Map really helpful for seeing how much snow I’m going to run into (or avoid).
• A friend recently gave me a cool wall project built using WLED – it’s simple, but really cool tech and a lot of fun (and I’m not even building anything – just playing with the settings).

And that’s that. Note – I’m taking next week off while I go on a walk in the woods. See you on July 12.

Posting a little later this week – which is weird, because it’s been a week where I’ve collected sufficiently more than five links I want to share…but sometimes things just get busy. Let’s get to sharing.

• Oh look – there’s another company claiming to do cool stuff with AI…except in this case, they actually are. This week, Autify announced their AI helper – Zenes. Take four minutes and then check out this video where they import a requirements document, then auto generate some gherkin (which can be edited) and then turn that gherkin into a set of playwright tests.
• As much as I like what Autify are doing (a simple and helpful improvement), there’s a lot of garbage out there wearing AI stickers. I’ve been waiting for someone to write this article for nearly a year.
• Along the same no-magic lines is this article on Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You
• A head-nodder from David Campbell on Why Takehome Interviews Suck.
• And finally – this article on cognitive load is a gem and a great read.

That’s it – I’m off to enjoy the Seattle heat.

I think this is just about the 250th FfF (give or take). You’d think the internet would run out of things by now, but so far, so …good?

• First up this week is a fascinating write up of How I Found A 55 Year Old Bug In The First Lunar Lander Game.
• The Art of Leadership by Michael Lopp discusses the importance of delegation (highly recommended book). But I also enjoyed this HBR article on Learning to Delegate as a First-Time Manager
• I liked this view on Organizational Debt. Organizations build process debt frequently, but don’t take the time to clean it up. Worth a reflection.
• This is interesting – Microsoft Chose Profit Over Security and Left U.S. Government Vulnerable to Russian Hack
• And now this is the world we live in – a real photograph won an AI award. This will not be the last time something like this happens.

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.

We are approaching the midpoint of 2024 already. While you ponder that, here are a few things that interested me this week.

• I’ve been reading Think Faster, Talk Smarter by Matt Abrahams. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about delivering information effectively, and looking for techniques for myself – as well as to help with my coaching. It’s not my favorite book on the subject, but does have some good nuggets.
• I haven’t linked to a Rands post in a while, but his post on The Robot Report #2 is a great read.
• I enjoyed this short but relevant post on From Problem to Solution: A Software Engineer’s Workflow
• I’m always a fan of yet-another-solution-for-flaky-tests – but this one is pretty good. Flaky Test Overhaul at Uber
• And finally, Danny Faught has a perfect write up on TDD in bash – Test-Driving fizzbuzz in bash

And that’s another week – thanks for reading.

Back for another week of random things you may or may not have discovered on your own.

• I’ve been re-reading The One Thing, by Keller and Papasan. Either it’s better the second time, or the timing is just better. You would think a book on getting things done by prioritizing and focusing would run out of steam, but it is absolutely full of wonderful nuggets.
• For reasons I’m sure I can only blame on curiosity, I played with Penrose a bit this week. I struggle sometimes to make the visuals that will help me tell the story I want, and now – with a little bit of work, I can make just about anything. I’m not sure yet if the effort is worth the output, but I’m going to keep it around for a while.
• Some really practical advice on something I’ve done quite a lot in my career. How To Present to an Audience Who Knows More Than You
• I enjoyed this article on 10x Followership (from the 10x manager). A lot of great points that too many leaders forget
• Forgot to mention last week, but I spent a chunk of time in New York City this month, and fit in this off-broadway show at the Twenty Sided Tavern and it was incredible. It was a combination of story telling, improv, audience interaction, and all the oddness of Dungeons and Dragons. Worth checking out.

Have a great weekend!

Finally back in the Emerald City after some time away. I have many stories to tell, but only five links to share.

• In a link that should surpise 0% of people who have even an inkling of critical thinking, A Study Finds that 52% of ChatGPT Answers to programming questions are wrong.
  But, IME, they’re often close.
• I had a lot of head-nods reading this article on The Challenge of Leaving a Long-Term Job to Start Something New
• You didn’t know you were curious about this, but you are now – Publicly Exposed AWS Document DB Snapshots
• I read some cheap fiction on my travels. This time it was Quantum Radio by A.G. Riddle. Writing was meh, but as a fan of the multiverse concept, it was a fun read.
• Interesting news from Germany – Germany has too many solar panels, and it’s pushed energy prices into negative territory. In this case, it doesn’t necessarily effect prices – but it’s a promising sign for clean energy.

See you next week.

This week has been…a week. But here are a few things I found worth sharing.

• I’m thoroughly enjoying the latest season of Welcome to Wrexham on Hulu. While I’m generally interested in anything soccer related, I’m fascinated by the joy and pain that comes with promotion/relegation in the English football system. And, it’s a pretty well done documentary.
• Not sure how new this is, but I discovered that Slack is going to train AI based on data from your workspace. You can opt out which is weird, but I pick up on what they’re trying to do.
• This article on exposed company secrets in private repos shows how easy it is to do dumb things. It reminds me of a quote that stuck with me from an underrated book called Release It! – keep in mind that the book was written several years ago.
  “GitHub currently shows 288,093 commits with the title “Removed password.” Tomorrow that number will be higher.“
• I feel like someone writes this article every year – and every year I nod my head and think that more people should read articles like this. You probably don’t need microservices
• I’ve been thinking a lot about recently about “Done is better than perfect”, and this article was a good reminder of why that quote is true.

We’ve done it again – see you all in a week.

It’s Friday, and there’s a lot going on in the world. I am finding the latest (and current) Trump trial interesting, and there’s big news in the Swifty world this week – but I’ll keep my links this week to the tech and leadership adjacent topics I usually try and stick with (just kidding – it’s almost all AI)

• First up is a shout out to my new favorite terminal – warp. It’s sort of perfect for me, and massively customizable. I haven’t had this much fun with a terminal since I used 4DOS in 1991.
• If you’re like me (and the data say you are), you rarely go to stackoverflow.com now that you have ChatGPT. Stackoverflow is run by smart people – so they’re partnering with OpenAI to make sure that they have the best answers.
• Of course, nothing to do with AI is without drama and hype,. Within a day, a bunch of folks on Stackoverflow rebelled.
• BUT – if you’re want to rise above it all and use AI responsibly, there’s this aptly named article on How to Implement AI — Responsibly
• Finally – every pointy-haired boss who pays for github co-pilot for their teams wants to know if it makes teams more productive. This is the only article I’ve read that has a research based bias. –Measuring GitHub Copilot’s Impact on Productivity. Of course none of those metrics are available to the pointy-haired bosses, but GitHub released a bit of the API in beta recently.

That’s all – or that’s AI – whichever works best for you. See you in a week.

Another week has flown by. This week, I have a mix of fun things I’ve found, plus just some random stuff I felt like telling you about.

• I’m a long time ToDoist user. It’s the way I make sure my dumb brain doesn’t forget to do important things. I’ve tried a lot of the alternatives, but none work as well for me. On Tuesday, ToDoist showed me this message:
  5 years, 5 months, 3 weeks, 5 days after you first started your Todoist journey on Nov 3 2018, you’ve joined just 0.05% of all Todoist users to ever reach Todoist Karma Enlightenment.
  So now we can say that I’m Enlightened!
• I bought another computer this week. I picked up a Lenovo X270 this week on ebay for about $200, and it’s remarkably beefy (i7, 16 gb ram, 512 SSD) for the price. I wanted a computer that I would feel comfortable bringing to the floor at DefCon, but fast enough to have fun and do some damage at CTF events, and it should be perfect.
• As a long time linux (mostly Ubuntu) user, I wanted to try something different, so I loaded Fedora onto the X270, and it runs absolutely perfectly. Every device works, and it’s fast. While installing software, I came across GPU Screen Recorder – which may be the best screen recorder I’ve ever used.
• I’m kind of not surprised with the stories in this article on how the rush to “do AI” is burning people out. I’ve seen it happen with a lot of the new things throughout my career.
• On a much more sensible note, Ethan Mollick has an entire book of sensible advice on using AI (disclaimer – perhaps I see it as sensible because it aligns with the stories I’ve been telling about use and mis-use of AI). Definitely worth checking out – Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI.

And there we have it – another list of five things i thought were worth sharing this week.