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.

Back again for another week of interesting things that I think are worth sharing.

• I’m guessing everyone already knows that IBM is buying Hashicorp – which is interesting, but maybe inevitable. We’ll see how this plays out.
• I spent a chunk of time reading some code in the recent release of the MS DOS 4.0 source code, and it certainly brought back some memories. I don’t think I ever looked at this while I was at msft (I joined in 1995), but I was certainly a heavy user of DOS4 when it came out.
• A fantastic article from Johanna Rothman this week on How to Move from Story Points and Magical Thinking to Cycle Time for Decisions
• I’ve worked on internal-facing tools for most of my career. Many times in the past few decades, I’ve been asked if something I or my team wrote should be sold (or given) externally. This article on Productizing internal tools does a wonderful job discussing when this is – or isn’t a good idea.
• Lastly – I was asked a few times recently about the recording platform we use for AB Testing – we use Riverside.fm – which so far has been near perfect, and a huge upgrade over zencastr. Hopefully it continues to deliver.

All for now – see you in a week.

I’m back for another week of weird – or sometimes interesting things I’ve found on the internet.

• First up, is Fallout on Amazon Prime. Fallout 4 is probably my favorite video game of all time, so I was a little hesitant to watch the series…but it’s fantastic. It’s a great story, and has a nice amount of pulls directly from the game while building on the Fallout world.
• This week, Dan Ariely wrote In Defense of Mistakes – which is really just another article advocating to learn from mistakes, but it’s still worth reading.
• I stumbled on this article about whether or not you really need to store all that telemetry. I remember talking to a developer on the Exchange team ~15 years ago, and at that time they had a lot of similar struggles – but nowhere near as elegant of a response as in this article.
• This article has a retrospectively obvious title with a great support story. Most micromanagers are blind to being seen as one.
• I’ve been reading Move Fast and Fix Things, and enjoying it. It reinforces the necessity of trust building when driving organizational change. It’s on the money with some good ideas.

And that wraps up another week. Hope you found something interesting.

Another week – a few more interesting discoveries from the internet.

• First off – the 2024 DORA survey is out. I look forward to seeing the results and analysis when they’re available.
• I continue to be a fan of Steve Denning’s writing – and of simple heuristics as well. His latest article on A Powerful Tool That Sees Behind The Financial Headlines is really interesting.
• I found Sad Servers this week. It’s like a CTF – but for debugging linux servers.
• I dropped using Windows when I left Microsoft (and used a Mac laptop my last year there). But it’s taken me until this week to discover RayCast, and I’m an insta-fan.
• Finally, HBR hit it out of the park with this short – and painfully accurate article on 4 Reasons Why Managers Fail.

That’s Five, so I’m out. Have a great weekend.