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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.

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.