Congratulations Django! One of the programming frameworks that has had the most impact on my professional life and has always been nothing other than good to me.
It’s relevant to my interests to read how others have massively scaled the systems we use. Discord has a solid write-up here of how to deal with Elastic Search.
We’ve revived our tech blog and will be sharing a bunch of stuff around our AI process and what it means to be an “AI first” company. Here’s an in-depth first piece about what it takes to develop a successful real life product with LLMs.
Chuffed by the strength of my team that we have most of the easy decisions from these Node.js pillars in place and we are making headway on all of them to the extent that’s appropriate for us.
Hard work isn’t always the work that takes the most time, or the work that gets paid the most. The hardest work is the work that challenges, makes us uncomfortable, or requires change. If we actually value hard work — we have to do some of our own.
It would be fitting if the tech layoffs would take some big bites out of the boundary of the firm and move us to more dynamic working arrangements. Unfortunately a country like Germany with its rigid social security is incredibly hostile to most such arrangements.
The Engineering Enablement podcast has been good to listen to—if a bit anodyne. The recent episode I listened to with Jeremiah Lee about Spotify’s massively popular but failed org structure was really fun and useful.
People will talk about the wage-price spiral (which has been demonstrated to be false), but they won’t talk so much about the herd behaviour at the higher echelons of our industry.
The autofocus way of handling todos has a charm in that it treats your work as an endless stream and tries to take the negativity and failure out of it. I now am doing something quite similar by using Things as the river and dragging tasks into my calendar which has a natural limit to it.
Any kind of workshop that you do virtually is going to be more difficult but in my experience a skilled facilitator and a motivated group can overcome these challenges.
“Declaring a feature that’s in customers’ hands “done,”without monitoring, or with flaky tests, or tons of highly redundant code, or other obvious pending work, doesn’t magically get that work done. That work will always be there. It’ll just show up as surprises in your Maintenance Roadmap at an unknown date, when your team has mentally moved on and stopped thinking about the feature.”
Improving the way we do posts is something I’ll be spending a bunch of attention on in the next months and here is an excellent guide of how to improve that part of the incident process.
A good list of skills that you will need when you want to level up, but if you have to choose one, pick “Clear Written Communication” and knock that one out of the park.
Slack has an interesting S-Curve based approach to adopting new technologies where they mention that getting through the trough of adoption is more like product-work than anything else.
I started a new job and thought I’d try out OmniFocus for a change after using Things very intensively at the last job. Things felt a bit constricting and I thought I’d try out the alternative app for a change.
Figuring out how to onboard yourself in a remote world is something that’s directly pertinent to me since I’m starting a new job right now. The content is very much the same but it’s still quite a different experience.
A strong overview of the various considerations around going back to the office that will help a lot of companies who stand to make this decision right now. Particularly interesting how the German lagging context will deal with it and what consequences it will have on the commercial property markets.
The trimodal salary distribution for Amsterdam (and likely other cities as well) as displayed here is very useful information and will hopefully help push compensation (and innovation) in Europe closer to American levels.
The nice part of working on open source is I can finally share some of the amazing work my team has been doing. Here’s some forthcoming Suricata contributions by Sascha and Frank with more on the way.
Looking at some Discord first organizations this describes how they could play out and how much potential is there if you want to put some effort in it.
A funny German interview with Ben Hammersley on the surface about laziness and productivity but what is a much more current strand to pull on is the ability to systematize large parts of our quotidian life and work.
“The second thing is that there’s almost no watchable esport for a normal person. The real issue is that no one has actually made [an esport] that people like to play, that is fun to play, that is also remotely tolerable to watch for a normal person. They’re all baffling. I dare anyone to turn on Overwatch in front of a person and even explain what’s going on to them. The closest we’ve gotten [to something watchable] is Rocket League, because it’s just soccer.”
The JIRA team does not use JIRA and of course why would they if anybody gave them the choice. Also, JIRA is often not used for software engineering anymore but it fits the bill for large scale workflows and compliance trails.