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I've been following Martin Stellar for some time and I find his material has made me a much better Product person. His writing is simple, clear and engaging, especially his free academy material . I thoroughly recommend you follow Martin Stellar on LinkedIn and read his materials.

I recently came across " Things I’ve learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager " by Jampa Uchoa and I loved it so much I wish I wrote it. Here are my favorite parts:  Everyone needs to care about the product : the most evident symptom of this is not happening is when we decide to hire QA or UX because we think they have the knowledge to fix the problem. Instead, the problem stays the same, and the flow of work breaks down. 60% of your job is being the cheerleader: the author mentions being the cheerleader for the team, and I would argue that we should also be the cheerleaders for the product. Your goal is for your team to thrive without you : I don't recall who said that leaders should be evaluated on their team's performance after they've left. It was probably former Navy captain David Marquet in "Turn the ship around! "

Via https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/ There's no point in having fuck-you money in the bank if you never say "fuck you"!

I'm kind of surprised Slack hasn't yet put out an AI feature. The potential is immense, imagine how many times the same question is asked and answered in a workspace... 

This year my xmas gift is the MP3 version of a seminal album of the '90s which is impossible to find on streaming services: Kruder & Dorfmeister's The K&D Sessions TM It does sound great!

Mostly out of curiosity and desire to learn I've tried to run open models locally on both LM studio and ollama, but I quickly realized the limitations intrinsic to my hardware (just a high-spec'd laptop). Curious to try AWS Bedrock I eventually settled on the following setup: litellm exposing Bedrock models (Qwen, atm) locally on an OpenAPI-compatible API (yes it's a mouthful). This works great for any tool that can be configured to use an OpenAPI-compatible API like Quill meetings . Getting VS code to work with this setup was more challenging as it required VS Code Insiders (the bleeding edge, AFAIU) and even in that case VS Code tends to forget settings or use them inconsistently. For example it always uses copilot for the inline code actions. llm  required some tweaking too, in particular the setting suggested in this comment . I am very impressed with litellm which provides accurate usage tracking per team or account. The potential for offering llm access on an interna...