Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.

In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells]

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Happy New Year to all

This is a good summary of the state of AI takes right now I think

No one knows anything about AI

AI is important. But we don’t yet fully know why.

AI currently has all the “noise” and incentives to hype that crypto had a few years ago, but underneath that is clearly much more “real”. It makes things hard to evaluate for now.

The first great fact which emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become “means.” There is no longer an “end”; we do not know whither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere.

Jacque Sellul

This quote has been haunting me all weekend. It describes and explains so much of the tension in modern life.

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.

Last year when I started powerlifting as my main form of exercise I set goals of being able to do

5x325 High bar squat 5x400 Deadlift 5x150 Overhead Press 5x250 Bench Press 10x body weight pull-ups (I’d never been able to do more than 2)

BP and Pull-ups are still struggling, but I’ve now managed 3/5

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

“I am human; and nothing human is alien to me” - Terence

Really enjoyed The Narnian by @ayjay — left contemplating what I find delight in. 📚

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:

1. It’s fine to be asked for a date or a scope (not both)
2. Never ship something likely to cause an incident

Reread The Hobbit for the first time in a few years. It’s a charming tale – and a good reminder that the movies were a complete misinterpretation of the tale – this is a much more innocent story than LOTR.

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.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

In Memoriam Section CVI — Alfred Lord Tennyson

Trying to smoke brisket for the first time. We’ll see how this goes

I love this clear visual summary of a Staff+ Engineer’s role from Tanya Reilly’s The Staff Engineer’s Path

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and then circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit— immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

Re-reading The Weight of Glory – probably the single most influential piece of writing on how I view the world.

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.

Beyond the left-right binary, it’s a profoundly localist film. Bedford Falls is a place where people aren’t just widgets, but names and faces. The bonds of genuine community help to soften the hard edges of life. Most of us want that for ourselves. (It’s also a film about accepting the limitations that community imposes, something we, like George Bailey, tend to find harder). What we see in the film that so many of are looking for is a sense that an ordinary life is worthy of honor, that money and power aren’t everything, that all of us are in it together. In other words, it’s a movie with a profound sense of the importance of solidarity.

Reflecting on the difficulties and joys of community a lot lately, and enjoyed this twitter thread about why “It’s A Wonderful Life” still resonates.

Exploring a personal blog for the first time in forever – we’ll see how this goes 🤔

“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:

1. Does it exist?
2. Is it the right info?
3. Is it delivered clearly?
4. Is it reliably up to date?
5. Can people find it reliably?

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.