bookmark_borderFive for Friday – September 6, 2024

I am back – sort of. I spent a week in the desert with 50,000 friends, and came back with a cold. I’m mostly better now, but do have a few things to share.

  • I’ve been reading a few articles about Plang – and while it’s not my favorite code, I like the idea of being able to create self-correcting code.
  • Articles like this one on paying your engineers to stay, are frequent. The concept is correct, but (IMO), not for every employee. If someone is important for long term success of the company, keep them engaged, and pay them well, but other folks may be better off leaving for greener pastures.
  • This article from Hazel Weakly is jam packed with ideas and concepts that teams should embrace. Home Baked Abstractions, Store Bought Implementations
  • Johanna Rothman is cranking out a wonderful series on How to Calculate the Cost of Delay to Rank All the Work. Part 3 is full of great insights (but of course, feel free to read the whole thing)
  • If I could have a penny for every f*%#^@ post this week on the failure of chatgpt to count the ‘R’s in the word strawberry I’d have almost a dollar! For those of you still confused and after two years still don’t have a clue how LLMs work, here’s an article to help. It’s not very good, but it’s simple and hopefully understandable.

Me and my snark will be back in another week.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – August 23, 2024

It’s Friday yet again. Before I forget – no FfF next week. Will tell you about it later. Here are some things I liked on the internet this week.

That’s it – see you in two weeks.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – August 16, 2024

It’s Friday, and it’s time to share five things I thought were interesting this week.

That’s all for this week – I’ll try again in seven days or so.

bookmark_borderFive For Friday – August 9, 2024

Back again – here’s what I have.

Short and brief today – see you in a week.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – August 2, 2024

I started writing today’s post and pondered for a moment how long I’ve been sharing stuff on Fridays. I’ll save you the search – it will be seven years in October.

Yet here we are again with five things that caught my interest this week.

And that’s that – see you in a week.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – July 26, 2024

Often, I type this thing up before Friday and schedule it to publish. I did this last week, and failed to say anything about the fun with Crowd Strike. As annoying as the bug was/is, I’m 10x more annoyed by the internet peanut gallery all chiming in on how this bug “never would have happened on their watch”.

Anyway – here’s some stuff to read.

  • Jason Arbon wrote one of the few sensible articles on the Crowd Strike madness. AI is involved, so that’s saying something. AI’s Testplan for CrowdStrike.
  • The Stack Overflow Dev Survey results are out – nothing surprising, but interesting anyway.
  • I’m always interested in security articles, so this article on getting deleted repos from github was worth the read…but you have to know a FULL FREAKING HASH to exploit it, so as I see it, it’s equal to “hacking” someone’s credit card after they post a picture of it on facebook.
  • I don’t often link to articles from product teams, but I like the take on incident metrics from Rootly.
  • I finally finished Kara Swisher’s latest book, Burn Notice. I liked it – but I think mostly because I really like Kara Swisher. It’s a bit of an auto-biography of her time in tech, and has an ample portion of good stories and personal anecdotes.

Hope you found something interesting here – see you in a week. Or this weekend if you read my stuff on The Weasel Speaks.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – July 19, 2024

This has been a wild week in this timeline – but beyond the US political drama, a few other interesting things caught my interest.

  • I’ve already devoured Season 3 of The Bear, but have also been really enjoying watching Killing Eve on Netflix. It’s sort of weird, but I usually like things that are sort of weird.
  • Johanna Rothman wrote an insightful article on How We Plan for Ourselves vs. How We Commit for Our Organizations…and I know some folks I want to read it too.
  • I found this collection of famous “flight bugs” and their root causes. I think a lot of us are aware of these, but it’s a nice recap in one place – How a Single Line of Code Brought Down a Billion Dollar Rocket
  • Nice encouragement to create Small Pull Requests from the google testing blog.
  • The Olympics are coming up, and we all get a chance to watch sports we would never watch otherwise. High on my list this year is synchronized diving – because I saw a video of Cook and Bacon (check out #cooknbacon) recently in a frame by frame that looked like a mirror.
    And also soccer – I will watch lots of soccer.

Another week done – have a great weekend.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – July 12, 2024

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.

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

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – June 28, 2024

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.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – June 21, 2024

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.

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