Category: All Posts

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.

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.

• First is this article on Finding Joy as a Manager — Even on Bad Days. A lot of good nuggets here for pondering. Note that this article requires a login to hbr, but is otherwise non-paywalled.
• And even more head nodding on this article – The real reason you have 29 dev and test environments. Please read this, and while you are trying to justify that your world is different, remember that odds are that you are not actually a snow flake.
• I also enjoyed this article on Crossing The Chasm: Getting to Senior/Staff Engineer – it hits many great points on what’s needed to get to more senior levels in software roles.
• Boeing is having some issues. Still. This is an interesting article on Why Cutting Costs is Expensive: How $9/Hour Software Engineers Cost Boeing Billions that probably applies to more companies than will admit.
• Nothing to do with software, but I’m super curious to understand why we’re finding weird ugly fish in southern California.

That’s it – see you in two weeks.

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

• I spent last weekend at DefCon (where thankfully, I did not pick up the infamous “Covid Badge”). I did, however, pick up a custom add-on to the DefCon electronic badge from my old colleague, Kevin – and it’s awesome.
  
• A lot of head-nodding in this article on How Scrum Masters (and Managers) Go Astray By Committing to Plans (and reminded me a lot of my thinking on the topic)
• IEEE has a new update to their Developer Productivity series: Developer Productivity for Humans, Part 7: Software Quality that’s worth a read,
• Buried in this story on The shortest, strangest engineering interview I’ve ever done are a lot of good ideas on interviewing – as well as a few laughs.
• Finally, I read this article on How to Plan Team Re-Organization – which I like a lot because it matches strongly with the way I like to think about these things.

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

Back again – here’s what I have.

• I am deep in the heat-hell of Las Vegas this weekend, where apparently, Las Vegas police issues cyber advisory with cybersecurity, hacker conventions in town – be careful out there…
• Speaking (tangentially) of security, remember that aUtH iS HaRd. Do better.
• I had a lot of head nods in this article on It’s Time to Do Away with “Dry Promotion from HBR
• I miss “simple” C programming. It’s easy(ish), it’s straight-forward, and it makes sense. Except, of course, when it doesn’t. What does it mean to initialize an int?
• I just re-read Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. It says that “good” strategy addresses the most critical challenges facing an organization, while bad strategy often involves vague goals, fluffy language, and a failure to confront the core problems. Yah – that feels right.

Short and brief today – see you in a week.

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.

• I’ve been playing contexto every day now. I played it a few years ago, and thought it was too hard, but came across it again, and this time I’m hooked. I got one word this week on my 15th guess with no hints, so there’s nowhere to go but down.
• Last week I linked to the results of the latest Stack Overflow survey. One thing that stood out for a lot of us who viewed the results was how many developers are frustrated by technical debt. This article on Don’t Ask Permission To Do Your Job Correctly: Avoiding The Technical Debt Trap is full of great nuggets.
• Another thing people don’t talk about in Accelerate (for more, see my latest post on The Weasel Speaks) is the little rant against maturity models. This article on Why I Dislike Maturity Models is possibly even better.
• Another head-nodder for me was this article on 7 Rules For An Effective Meeting Culture. So much great info here that is so often ignored.
• Finally – I had some fun refreshing my poor SQL skills by playing The SQL Murder Mystery.

And that’s that – see you in a week.

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.

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.

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.