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In Clear Thinking , Shane Parrish argues (correctly IMHO) that rules can help us achieve our goals because: they remove all the decision making and effort  they fight the social default, as, oddly enough, people will be less inclined to argue with someone's rules An example mentioned in the book: my goal is to drink less soda. Instead of going through a sapping decision process every time I go out on whether or not I will drink soda, and maybe have to fight other people pushing back on my decision I can eliminate all this decision making at once by setting a rule instead: I don't drink soda . Now there's nothing left for me to decide, and if someone offers a me a soda, I can decline both politely and definitively (for most people, at least). I don't need to exert my willpower every time to choose the action that will get me closer to my goal of drinking less soda, but I can just rely on the rule to do all the decision-making for me. In my experience I find that the g...

From  https://awfulwoman.com/notes/2024/11/homeprod-not-homelab/ : If your homelab is being used by others it isn’t a homelab - it’s home production.

Quoting myself: There aren't good or bad ideas, only good or bad executions.

 From https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/12/effective-board-members-create-value-for-startups : One of the analogies I often use for the role of a board is that of being a “mirror” to the management team. Entrepreneurs, by their nature, live on a roller-coaster ride that is matching their startup’s journey. Their perception of the business is often an amplification of the current state of the business. The highs are often more optimistic than the business might really deserve and the lows are often much lower than they should be. The board should reflect a snapshot of the reality of the business. All businesses, both the most successful and the somewhat troubled, involve a lot of sausage-making. There are aspects that are not working well that shouldn’t be brushed aside or ignored, but should be focal points of improvement. Conversely, when things aren’t going well, entrepreneurs can often be too critical of their own business. By placing things in the context of other experiences, the...

While there are many summaries of practices that foster Psychological Safety there is a recipe that I've picked up recently which I believe is supremely powerful both at work and in life (especially with children). The recipe allows us to gracefully handle the delivery of negative news, negative feedback, or general disagreement creating an environment which encourages open and honest communication. The reasoning is that open and honest communication will allow us to get the heart of the problem, and then, hopefully tackle it. It is surprisingly simple and boils down to framing our response in these terms (in order): Thank you for sharing it with me I believe you Tell me more

Via imgur: The story about hard disks is true, btw. Rotational hard disks, that is.

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?