Category: All Posts

I think I’ve fully recovered from my long walk. My home office is a a mess right now, but I’m hoping this weekend is the time when I finally get everything put away. In the meantime, here are a few articles I found interesting this week.

• I’m well aware that almost all of you already read Michael Lopp’s blog posts. It’s no secret that I’m a fan, and I try not to read every article he writes. This week’s post on The Seven Meetings You Hate is worth posting here anyway.
• I’m one of those odd self-taught programmers, but I’ve always enjoyed some of the algorithm metaphors that exist. I really enjoyed this article on The Drinking Philosophers Problem.
• I learned about Steampipe this week (select * from cloud;). Looks like a lot of fun, and something I’m definitely going to be playing with.
• The internet (esp. linkedin) is full of people who haven’t bothered learning anything about AI or LLMs dismissing it all as a toy or a fad. The rest of us, are playing catch up, and getting as much context as we can to understand how LLMs will advance software engineering. I thought this article on Challenges with Adopting Domain-Specific LLMs had a lot of good thoughts and insights.
• I’m way behind on podcast listening, but I just added The Geeking Out podcast based entirely on the interview with Hazel Weakly.

Thanks again for reading, and hope you found something interesting. See you next week.

I’m just back from a trip off the grid, so probably missed a lot – but here are a few things I think are worth knowing about.

• First, a little about my trip. I just hiked The Wonderland Trail. I hiked the trail in about six and a half days – day two was 80+ degrees (Fahrenheit), and on day 6, I was getting snowed on. The joys of high altitude in the fall.
• After years of using the DuckDuckGo search engine, I began using their browser a few weeks ago. I love that it integrates directly with BitWarden.
• I enjoyed this well thought out – and accurate review of the current state of GitHub Actions.
• This morning, I read a great article on Stories Leaders should Tell.
• I found the Drawn to Leadership blog today, and enjoyed the post on Flow (as described by Mee-High Chick-Sent-Me-High (sp)).

Short and sweet this week – have a great weekend.

So much going on this week, but as usual, thought of a few things worth sharing.

• Way back in November 2017, I was on the Testers Island Discs podcast, where I shared five songs I’d listen to while stranded on a desert island. One of those songs was Twin Rocks Oregon, by Shawn Mullins – who I got to see and hang out with a bit last night. Always great to see him play, and I think most people know that I’m a sucker for singer songwriters.
• Something else I’m frequently fond of are articles about Feedback Loops. I enjoyed this one on Optimizing Feedback Loops
• I took the AWS icon quiz this week. It’s awesome and it’s dumb, and I don’t know anyone who got more than 4 right.
• I posted about the McKinsey article last week, and found another reaction to it this week that (I think) is worth reading.
• Finally this week is a great article The Slowest GitHub PRs In Recorded History. Pretty interesting stuff, and I wish I would have tracked something similar when I was at $job -2.

The sun is out in Seattle – have a great weekend everyone.

I am almost completely recovered from my bout with coronavirus. Only thing remaining is a lingering cough, and that I now need about two more hours of sleep a night than I have in decades. I’m still planning a long hike in a few weeks, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. In the meantime, I’ve scoured the internet looking for the finest articles about stuff that I care about. Or, more likely, just some stuff I found that I thought was worth sharing.

• This is going to be a quadruple link bullet post – but just in case you happened to miss it, McKinsey came out with a report on measuring developer productivity a few weeks ago. It’s umm…well anyway, Kent Beck and Gergely Orosz (from the pragmatic newsletter) wrote a pair of reaction posts (part 1, part 2) which are excellent – and then today, Brian Finster posted his thoughts. Read it all.
• I like Python – and I know enough Python to do…simple things. But I ran across this WTF Python repo on github, and it’s been enlightening to learn a bit about a whole bunch of features and constructs that I am not familiar with.
• I re-read Amy Edmondson’s The Fearless Organization every year or so, and always learn something new. I was thrilled to discover yesterday, that she has a new book coming out, The Right Kind of Wrong – which I’ve already pre-ordered. I reserve the right to bring it back to a FfF link after I read it.
• My current team is fully remote (although I prefer the term, “location neutral”). My previous job was spread across more than a dozen offices, so it was practically remote as well. As such, I am always looking for ways to better connect teams who aren’t co-located, and ran across this great article on Building remote company culture with AI.
• And to contrast that (sort of), this article on Remote Work – which makes the point for everyone going back to the office – but also recognizes that there are benefits on both sides of the RTO argument. I have my own opinions…that I’ll share eventually.

That’s it for another week – good to get two of these out in a row. See you in a week.

Oh hey – I’m back. First there was DefCon – then there was the covid I caught at Defcon, and now I’m back to the world of the living and managed to be awake enough this week to find a few cool things worth sharing.

• I’m a big fan of John Cutler’s writing – I thought this week’s post of his is worth pondering.
• I liked this article where the author wonders if small teams are better. It’s a look at the opposite side of the mythical man month (whether intended or not), but makes a lot of great points.
• Mako pointed me to this article on training nanoGPT on blog content. I tweaked it and ran it on my substack content (with only 40 blog posts), and found the whole thing pretty interesting.
• It’s a day that ends in a ‘Y’, which means I ran across someone on the internet whining about chat GPT, yet taking zero interest in attempting to understand how LLMs work. On the other hand – this article on using Chat GPT to make decisions, is, in my opinion, spot on.
• My covid fever had me in search of mindless movies to watch. After both enjoying and hating Cocaine Bear, I was amused to see this story, which can only really lead to a Bears On a Plane movie. If we’re lucky.

This is usually where I say, see you next week – which I think I can say, but you never know.

Back again for another week of random links that bounced around my head this week. I hope you find something interesting.

• First off, there may, or may not be a FfF next week, as I’ll be at DefCon! I’ve wanted to attend for a long time, but work, then covid (which I’m still a bit nervous about) got in the way, but I’m committed this year. I found this beginners guide to defcon series to be helpful and interesting.
• I could (and should…) write an entire blog post on why your standup meetings suck. This article on why Standups are Outdated is enough to get the conversation started while I let the idea bounce around in my brain.
• I watched a bit of the c-span coverage of the Trump arraignment yesterday – and once again was surprised by the misinformation. Here’s a nice summary of how People Are Lying To You About The Trump Indictment. It’s super-informative and clears up (for me at least) a lot of the crap talking points
• Chris Fenning’s The First Minute is still my go to reference on how to begin conversations, but along those same veins is this article on The Art of the Request. Far too often, people will complain to me that people “don’t do what they ask” – and far too often, the problem is on the wrong side of the airlock.
• Pure brag, because they’re sold out (of print versions), but I snagged a book version of 50 Years of Text Games, and I’m super excited.

That’s all – thanks for reading.

I have fully recovered from the Taylor Swift concert last week, and ready to share a few things I think are interesting.

• We may as well lead with Tay – not surprisingly, the Seattle shows registered measurable seismic activity I’m sure the same will happen in Santa Clara this weekend.
• I want to link to Abi Noda’s newsletter every week, but I’m sure you all read it yourself already. This week, however, I want to highlight his post on reflective goal setting (or as I think of it – a personal retrospective). I’ve been doing something similar for years, and it really works. Definitely worth a read and a try.
• I’m one of those weirdos who loves shell scripting. I’m also one of those people who forgets shit all the time. This bash cheatsheet – while one of millions on the subject, works quite well for me.
• I’ve been fascinated with this Climate Analyzer from University of Maine. Fascinated and a little frightened. It’s worth checking out.
• There can be only Two. My weekly FfF posts are inspired by Tim Ferris’s Five Bullet Friday. But now there’s another FfF player on the block – Anand Jayaram has joined in on the FfF fun (FfFf?) with his weekly Five for Friday posts.

Thanks again for reading – have a great weekend, wherever you are.

Not only are we smack in the heat of summer, but for the first time in nearly four years, Seattle will actually look like people live there when 70,000 Taylor Swift fans, combined with 30,000 baseball fans all try to get downtown at once.

Should be a blast. Meanwhile, here is some stuff worth sharing.

• I went on a hike a few weeks ago. I knew I’d be walking 8+ hours a day for 4+ days, so I thought an audio book would be in order. My criteria was pretty narrow: It had to be fiction – and not great fiction, since I didn’t want to have to rewind to replay parts where I was concentrating on footing or animals or whatever. I still wanted it to be entertaining enough to keep my interest, and because I’m super-cheap, it had to be available for free through the library. The Origin by Dan Brown was perfect. The story, while laughably predictable, had just enough of the canonical Brown literary bubble gum to keep me interested throughout the hike. It’s not serious reading, but it was fun.
• I meant to post this last week, but Elisabeth Hendrickson wrote a great article a few weeks back on Expanding Universes and Fixed Envelopes
• …and from even farther back, but found today – this is helpful. What is Developer Experience? a roundup of links and goodness
• Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory have another great post in their series – this time on building a foundation of core practices
• I ran across this article on Escaping the Availability Trap. It’s a good read, and good fodder for everyone who insists they are “too busy” to get meaningful work done. We all get the same 24 hours a day – we all just have different ideas on how to organize and prioritize that time.

Once again, that’s all. See you on the other side of this wild Seattle weekend.

Is it just me, or did this week get extra-busy? Just me? Oh well, between life, work, animals, kids, and summer, I still managed to find a few links this week worth sharing.

• I was talking on the latest podcast about the World of Warcraft Guide to Project Management – which inspired Andreas Worm to share The Gamemasters Framework for Software – and I love it.
• I enjoyed this article on Fighting the Emergence of Dark Agile. Something my colleagues often hear from me is: “The focus is on solving problems, not implementing features.”
• I may have linked to this article in the past, but it popped up in my reading list again. Why software projects take longer than you think: a statistical model. I’ve long believed in estimates with a 50% confidence level (a sweet spot between over-planning and starting without thinking). This article is at least adjacent to that notion.
• I loved the stories and history from Patrick Prill in his post – Software Testing for 20 years – Patrick says “don’t read it”, but I am overriding his decision. Go read it.
• On my hike a few weeks back, I took a Nitecore 10000 charging brick. Absolutely amazing how much I could charge on something so light. Definitely a must for future backpacking trips as well.

And there we go. We’ll see what happens next week.

Last week, I scheduled this post, and somehow in doing that I (debatable) made it a private post for subscribers only. That, of course, means that I’m going to schedule this post for 10 minutes from now to see what happens under careful observation.

• I scheduled the post last week, because I was walking 70 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. I first walked on the PCT nearly 50 years ago, and have been a bit infatuated with it (off and on) ever since. Someday, I’d like to walk all 2650 miles of it.
• Open Org recently released their Employee Handbook Template – and it’s kind of cool – or at least worth checking out.
• I’m currently balancing my DM and Group Chat time between Teams and Slack (weird, but true). I’m pretty sure I don’t want this, but in my haphazard searching to try and see how other folks balance this, I found that some teams just give up and use a tool like Mio Dispatch to make them both feel like one tool.
  I’ll keep looking for a better answer.
• I think at a lot of companies, it takes too long to get new engineers up to speed. This article on onboarding new engineers hit’s the main points (and with great citations to back up their claims).
• Finally, some food for thought. This post asks, Are bugs and slow delivery ok? I think the question is valid – and while I agree that for some products, slow and buggy may be ok, but I disagree that it’s 95%…but I sort of hate that the author is sort of right.
  I need to ponder this some more…

That’s all for this week – apologies again for the posting mishap last week, I’ll try to keep my shit together.