The global cybersecurity disaster that consisted of yesterday’s critical vulnerabilities in the PHP project is a good moment to talk about the natural life cycle of open source projects. There are cases where it may be better to shut things down.
I learned a bunch of stuff about passkeys here and I continue to be validated in my decision not to use them. It’s very complicated and opaque and the ‘just trust me bro‘ from the various proponents who are employed by large tech companies is not an adequate guarantee.
It’s not so clear cut as it’s made out to be here. Of course writing code should never have been your bottleneck to begin with. What LLMs have done is to remove “I need to write the code” as an excuse.
Knowing what to build, knowing when the system is telling you something, knowing when to cut, knowing when the fast path is the wrong path — these were never just “execution.” They were always the harder parts and to pretend they’re solved by AI is questionable, to say the least.
This is an interesting realignment of the org chart. I’m not sure whether we’ll reach that endpoint, but it’s obvious to divide the team into the factors laid out in the article.
No individual in the organization will ever have an accurate mental model about how the entire system works. To put it simply: It’s the stuff we don’t know that bites us. There’s always stuff we don’t know.
It sounds so simple but the amount of work and trade-offs involved in getting to a single list of priorities is where a lot of the difficult work lives.
Europe has lots of significant industries and capabilities. There is nothing stopping us from having a competitive local cloud offering (except of course the lack of political will).
This is a very good framework from Matt Webb for organizations how to do strategic pathfinding when it comes to AI. In Germany especially, lots of orgs would benefit from doing this instead of whatever it is that they are busy with right now.
Ribbonfarm retiring is another such ending in a time rife with them. I can’t overstate how influential it has been on my (our) thinking and practice. Tremendously impressive to think all of that was thought up by one person (who I still haven’t met).
As somebody working in platform for the past years, I’ve become very familiar with the different dimensions of this debate around productivity and John here unpacks the topic in a way that’s really useful. I used the nails analogy just yesterday.
Trying for years to explain to people that Germany has almost zero project power and is incapable of any progress and then suddenly a movement springs up that agrees entirely with that assessment.
The thing that Bert is not getting here is that Gaia-X is meant to be a distraction and not much else (that “else” would be politically far too risky to act upon). That’s the way these kind of things work. Meanwhile Europe will remain without its own cloud.
The end of free money has had a huge negative impact on open source. I agree with the author here, it would have been better to license everything under copy-left and see what happens.
The Netherlands is facing similar problems where depressed salaries, lack of housing and rampant overt racism are making it difficult to attract digital talent from all over the world.
As somebody who dove pretty deep into how to run a creative agency in a way that’s innovative and goes against the grain, I really like what Village One here in Berlin are doing with their cooperative approach.
Last week I was making a presentation and I came across Deming and his principles. I have often gotten the question: “If you don’t measure X, then how will you know we’re doing well or improving?” which I always felt was misguided.
Doing the things listed here as a VP by Emily Nakashima sounds all nice and well (maybe fun even for some people), but the core deliverables of alignment and focus are the real test: both are impossibly hard to achieve and worth their weight in gold.
It’s understandable that organizations try to make their word legible and simplify things. In fact, it’s one of the reasons for the organizational boundary.
A nice article about Box’s transformation and especially that chart contrasting burn v. growth is one of the most important things for any startup to keep in mind.