The intended takeaway from all this is exactly where we started in the introduction: creating quality is context specific. Be wary of following the playbook you’ve seen before, even if those playbook were tremendously successful. They might work extremely well, but they often don’t unless you have a useful model for reasoning about why they worked in the former environment.
Loved the thoughts on quality here from Will Larson: lethain.com/quality/
Over a year old, but new to me – I thought this series of posts was a great roundup of some of the issues that make tech a less happy place to work than in the previous decade: Software and its Discontents
Very helpful writeup on LLMs in production: What We’ve Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs
Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail
This is an old piece, but new to me. What a great turn of phrase, and accurate insight about doing hard things.
Diving back into (Neo)Vim this week for the first time in a few years (have done my core work with VS Code for a while).
Telescope Plugin + Language Server Providers are nice additions to the landscape, and it all feels so powerful, but everything is still so fiddly to setup :/
Really enjoyed these reflections on LLMs: medium.learningbyshipping.com
AI, ChatGPT, and Bing…Oh My
Basically from a “quality triangle” perspective – execs can control costs or time, but holding the line on a minimum quality bar is essentially a core piece of my job, and nobody wins when you try to promise impossible combinations of scope/quality/dates.
In an ideal world, org leaders define goals and teams figure out what to do. But top down asks happen. How I decide whether to push back on top down asks as an EM:
The idea that things become hits mostly due to a small number of large audiences rather than point to point viral sharing seems intuitively correct to me: www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/viralit…
Or at least the large audiences “seed” the viral behavior
As employees return from holiday break, [Shopify] said it’s conducting a “calendar purge,” removing all recurring meetings with more than two people “in perpetuity,” while reupping a rule that no meetings at all can be held on Wednesdays. Big meetings of more than 50 people will get shoehorned into a six-hour window on Thursdays, with a limit of one a week.
This is fascinating to me. I get the desire to remove bloated meetings, but there are recurring meetings that I find genuinely valuable to have sync (project standups / staff meetings). Curious if this ends up being a long term policy for Shopify or more of a culture reset.
I love this clear visual summary of a Staff+ Engineer’s role from Tanya Reilly’s The Staff Engineer’s Path
Growing as an engineer is less about being right more often and more about finding ways to stop being wrong quickly
When working on a “stretch project”, it’s tempting to keep your plans high level when getting review / sign off. This sabotages feedback - the value of experience is in the details.
Write out specific plans and then seek out feedback from folks who’ve done work like it before.
“God and sinners reconciled”.
Merry Christmas everyone.
This is a nerdy but helpful way of explaining an important management concept – an org can’t prioritize if people don’t say no till its too late. twitter.com/benskuhn/…
Having a lot of discussions about documentation lately. 5 things matter with docs:
If your “documentation is bad” make sure you’re solving the right problem.
Free Speech didn’t last long twitter.com/TwitterSu…
This Twitter madness is something to behold
What was promised: many new features, free speech What we got: team cut to maintenance mode bone, banning critical journalists
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanksgiving is a reminder of the blessing of family – my kids were surrounded by their cousins, grandparents and aunts/uncles today and really soaked it in, as did I. Thankful.