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Excellent insight on conterfactuals in the context of (some of) the analysis of that latest AWS outage (emphasis mine): Counterfactuals are seductive. They tidy up messy stories . “If only we’d done X.” “If only they’d noticed Y.” They sound analytical, but they’re fictional . As the saying goes, “If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle.” Once we start changing the facts, we’re not talking about reality anymore: we’re imagining a different one that didn’t happen. It’s easy to laugh at Joey, but we all do it. Just look at all the hot takes on the large AWS outage this week. We look back at a failed project, a near miss, an incident or accident, and feel the seductive pull of “they should have..” or “they shouldn’t have…” because we crave causality and coherence. When something goes wrong, we want to believe that there was a single point of failure that we can fix for next time, reassuring ourselves that it won’t happen again. But as Dekker reminds us,  “…[counterfactuals] ...

The advice I like to give anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work . Chuck Close -  via Farnam Street  - emphasis mine I saw Mark at MOMA a while back and was blown away by the superhuman attention to detail

I feel that terms like full stack developer and generalist ran out of steam and don't capture the attention they should IMO, enter versatile . I came across it while listening to  Scaling Manufacturing  and, surely enough, when I went to check Oxide Principles , Versatility is listed under Values:  Versatility: while we must naturally specialize, our bold mission also demands that any of us may need to apply ourselves in a new domain – and indeed, that many of us will be doing this much of the time.

Businesses cannot remove developers without losing the understanding needed to build and maintain software. Tools like outsourcing, no-code, or AI can speed work but cannot replace comprehension. Design platforms and practices that amplify developers' context and collaboration instead of trying to eliminate them. Source -  via LinkedIn Reminds me of  Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs

There's not a lot of content out there talking about physical product manufacturing, so when I saw the episode on Scaling Manufacturing on my podcast queue I jumped right into it. Here are my highlights: Testing - while manufacturing - as early as possible If you've been aware of DevOps and Continuous Integration this will sound rather obvious, but it's always interesting to see these principles working in areas outside of software development. Medusa : Oxide's front plane loopback board which helps identify issues with high performance cabling as early as possible Reverso : a "mock" compute sled which allows Oxide to test the cable back plane without needing a compute sled Single sourcing components as a relationship investment Apple is - famously - another company that does single-sourcing (can't find the quote ATM). Here's how Oxide explains it : it's been really great working with our suppliers and they really are Oxide fans. Um, which is nic...

Wiring the Winnning Organization has the best illustration of why Agile works: (hope it's fine to manually copy it - not a scan or picture)