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This LinkedIn post hurt 😅: The metrics they create for engineering help them convey to the board and to the other non technical department how engineering is helping the business move forward, how engineering is adding value. Not what the DORA metrics say without any relationship to what the company is trying to achieve. As a huge DORA fan, I am hurt that DORA is not the pinnacle of clarity that I want it be, especially since I have it on the deck I present the board each quarter. The fact is that Adelina Chalmers is right. The language of business is accounting and engineering performance should be ultimately connectable to bottom line impact. If it can't, there is a disconnect which will ultimately lead to a rough wake up call. So what can we use instead? A similar question was asked in the CTO Craft slack. Here is my take, straight off the top of my head (so probably still a bit rough). Considering that a C-Level/Board would be talking at the level of impact , we need to con

Last week I was helping one of my children with their history study, and I came across something I had forgotten: the clear distinction between prehistory and history. Prehistory ends with the discovery of writing, and history begins. Is there a prehistory and history for organizations too? Can an organization benefit in a similar way as the human civilization did by committing to a writing culture? I think so. I wrote an advocacy piece on writing culture here .

Another mind-expanding episode from The Knowledge Project. Two sentences are without a doubt worth quoting as a note-to-self exercise: So in particular, as I started to get some level of moderate success in business, my network started to grow, and I started to become friends with people that were much further ahead than me, and it almost led to this insecurity and: Ultimately, [the goal is] to have those good ideas, so how do I put myself in a position to have those good ideas? That’s a lot of reading; that’s a lot of consuming of just basic information out there. So reading, even just publicly traded companies in our space, reading the reports. How are the CEOs thinking? How is the market looking at these businesses and what are they saying?  It’s networking with people, extracting those insights. I call it almost like engineered serendipity. How do you put yourself in a bunch of different situations to just extract an idea? How can you go idea harvesting?

Collaboration : working together towards an output . For example: collaborating on a presentation, book, song, etc. Cooperation : working together towards an outcome . For example: "customer centricity", volunteer fire departments protecting communities, different departments sharing resources but working separately Which one do you need, and when?

Awesome video from Stanford CS which goes into the details of building LLMs and how they work. Really interesting explanation on the impact of tokenizers on LLM ability to "interpret" code, such as Python which relies on whitespace for its structure. Highly recommended to understand the details how LLMs work and what the tricky parts are.

Well written and balanced article on the impact of Working From Home on productivity, and the general economy (i.e. downtown stores) in both fully-remote and hybrid setups:  https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/09/working-from-home-is-powering-productivity-bloom

Excellent advice from Thorsten Bal l: When debugging or testing your program, do not use data that looks like a variable or type name.  Do not use data that looks like a label or a column name or something your operating system has tons of. Do not use data that looks like it’s part of the program. I would also add that using real-istic data has the advantage of testing our system under conditions that are closer to those that might be in the field.