If you only read one thingHow leaders kill meaning at work (19 minute read) Giving meaning, purpose, context, explaining the world are the most important things of a leader (beside a vision + strategy, could be my next book, nah, will be on developer joy & productivity :-) To the article. The authors identify four traps that kill meaning:
Nice titles, sorry to say you need to read the article to learn how not to kill meaning. But therefore it’s in the “If you only read one thing” https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/how-leaders-kill-meaning-at-work Graph of the week
From: Session 01 LEVELS OF PMF (76 minute read) Excellent article about PMF, the most important thing in the first years of a startup.
Stories I’ve enjoyed this weekProgramming Is Mostly Thinking (14 minute read) “11/12 of coding is thinking” Yes and no. The article is a good argument when
the CEO thinks developers are not typing enough, or not sitting enough in front
of the screen, or should be in the company most of the time. But again, yes and no.
We need to take a closer look at Programming. My model adapted from the book IdeaFlow looks like this:
https://agileotter.blogspot.com/2014/09/programming-is-mostly-thinking.html PostgreSQL Is Becoming the De Facto Database Standard (14 minute read) From the fine folks of Timescale (❤️ Timescale extension for Postgres) about PostgreSQL. (disclaimer: article is citing me). I recently thought that PostgreSQL will do to databases what Linux did to Unix systems - all of them were soaked into Linux, IRIX, AUX, SunOs and all the others that existed in the 1980s. Same here with Postgres. https://www.timescale.com/blog/postgres-for-everything/ Sad but true, “Given the interruptions, meetings, and other corporate curveballs in the office, how long would this big rock have taken?” People please, let employees just do their work, don’t interrupt them all the time. Don’t force your schedule on people. PLUS “I change my productivity system every year or so. I’m in my second year of using Asana. What started out as a convenient and productive way to track my work became what every single productivity system has become to me: yet another inbox.” Tools help implement your solution, they are never the solution, a thing people forget. If you have too much inbox, reduce the inbox, don’t get a tool to manage the inbox. “Now we use Notion for documentation” Notion is not the solution to your communication and documentation problems. You need to find a solution and then Notion can help you make it work. Don’t confuse the tool with the solution. https://randsinrepose.com/archives/one-thing/ The Man Who Killed Google Search (22 minute read) So, ads at Google decided they needed more revenue and Google search got worse (didn’t it?!). Not too relevant anymore, all SEO will die when people use AI to answer questions. I wonder how startups will fare when SEO is dead. Interesting read about the inside of Google though #enjoy https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ How to Juggle Priorities: Decide Which Balls Are Glass and Which Are Plastic (8 minute read) My take: Ignore the things you can ignore and that don’t have impact (those are more than you think). Delegate as much as possible (again, more than you think). The interesting point of the article is “The key to juggling is to know that some of the balls you have in the air are made of plastic and some are made of glass. And if you drop a plastic ball, it bounces, no harm done. If you drop a glass ball, it shatters, so you have to know which balls are glass and which are plastic and prioritize catching the glass ones.” But what makes a ball glass? Read the article. “The AI assistant for Tailwind” #WTF? An AI assistant for CSS? (But I might use it ;-) Never struggle to give feedback again (even to your manager) (10 minute read) Many struggle to give feedback. My first advice: Don’t sugar coat or add things. You can be friendly and polite and direct at the same time. Don’t confuse these things Key in this article: “Build a relationship with the other person way before feedback conversations” Many more good points. https://read.highgrowthengineer.com/p/never-struggle-to-give-feedback-again Today I Learned That Not Everyone Has An Internal Monologue And It Has Ruined My Day. (42 minute read) As someone who has a constant internal monologue, often too much of it, the idea that some people might not have this at all, was mind-blowing. What about you? What does Goldman Sachs want in a coder? For them to have studied philosophy (9 minute read) Philosophy for coders? Ha, I got the first “Philosophical Computer Science” Diploma from my university, some years before this was officially possible. But a little bit of convincing and negotiating with the people who run the university, and I got a diploma that was not possible. More things are possible than you can imagine. But back to the article, philosophy! Do you change your recruiting now? IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4 billion deal to expand in cloud (5 minute read) People depend on HashiCorp for security with their Vault product. The HashiCorp changes it’s license. And clear as they they did it to be sold. And they are sold to IBM. What happens to Vault is unclear. It’s just like VMWare being bought, license changed, CTOs are desperate. I was once caught cold by a 10x license cost increase by a vendor we had no alternative (to $800.000). I hope you have a “plan-b” for all critical software products you are using. CloudNordic have now gone bust (3 minute read) A cloud provider was hacked. All data and backups encrypted by Ransomware. Customers lost all their data. This is why you don’t have backups when all your backups are with the same cloud provider that you use for your production environment. If on AWS, store backups on Google Cloud (also it’s easier to protect against angry DevOps people you had to fire). https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/112320158916042946 My book is available now“If you have only time to read a single book about engineering management - try this one” Christian Küchler, Director Software Engineering @ Solactive AG
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You read the existing code
to build up a model of the code in your head.
You think about the changes.
You make the changes in your head.
You write the code to disk.
Your brain is essentially an (imperfect) cache for the model in the code.
Sidenote: All interruptions will drop the cache, and you have to build it newly
in your brain, which takes 10 to 20 minutes for me (until I’m back in the flow,
a.k.a. the model is cached again).