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This week on the  https://refactoring.fm/ community a member asked the difference between a good Engineering manager and an exceptional Engineering manager. In the conversations that followed someone suggested that " a good manager leads the team, a great manager creates a team of leaders ". That immediately reminded me of how in Turn the ship around , the author Captain L. David Marquet argues that leaders’ performance should be measured by how their reports perform after the leader has left. A few days later I was listening to the Knowledge Project podcast (I usually listen to most episodes two or three times to make sure I can get all the knowledge), and I made the connection of the above to tech debt. Someone who is a good leader but is required/essential for the performance of his reports is the transposition of code tech debt in the organization hierarchy. The organization trades going further in the long term for going fast in the now. Touch points between the two

Agency, skill, and mastery are topics on which I have so many thoughts, and I am still discovering myself. This writing summarizes my position as of roughly April 2024. Agency, as pictured below, is to take on things, doing hard things without waiting for conditions to be perfect or otherwise blaming others or your circumstances. Examples of low agency: I could develop so much faster if only the code was not so crappy!  We would be already finished if this or that team had done their job properly!  If only my boss (or company) understood me, I could really do great things for this Company or my team! High agency behavior:  I'll try to make changes to the code/add tests/etc as I work on parts of it so that I will, over time, be faster. Let's see if there are ways that I/we co

The XZ backdoor has been covered extensively in various writings, but I had to listen to this episode because it features Andres Freund, who discovered the backdoor: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1843393 And of course, Bryan Cantrill did not disappoint. His energy and passion, together with the unique views and understanding he has around topics that are otherwise trite and thought to be well understood , to me looks pretty much like how a reality distortion field would work. The big revelation for me is that we've all been featured in a movie. You know the classic movie plot in which one person finds something out, and then they go about telling everybody about it, and nobody believes them but they take it upon themselves to save the world? That's what happened, well except everybody took Andres seriously from the beginning this time. And the world was saved. Pheeewww. Well, it was saved this time.