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A few years ago I told my therapist that I felt conflicted about thinking about work when I was not at work. For example, while doing the dishes, being at the park with the kids, or riding the bike with them. As my therapist encouraged me to do ( what is the question? he would patiently ask when I would share a statement without a question), I then asked him: "Does that make me a bad father or husband?" What he said next, had a huge impact on how I felt about some of my actions. He asked me back: what is the one universal attribute that can make anything good or bad? I gave up after a solid 5 minutes, and then he revealed the answer to me: it's quantity. How much are you thinking about work? All the time, or every once in a while, when idling? Do you feel that it's so much that you are neglecting something or someone else more important (including myself)? It's like chocolate, he continued: one spoon is ok, the whole jar not quite. Or wine: a glass is probably fi...

“The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life.” Pick your work colleagues and culture wisely. One third of your awake time is spent at work.

Brilliant take on the iconic Trainspotting Choose Life  opening, applied to fast flow: Via:  https://devexconnect.io/conferences/manchester-24/

The best people (game-changers) leave when they run out of things to learn.

There's one bit of this excellent piece by John Cutler that really caught my attention, and I've added it to my bag of leadership tricks (emphasis mine): Could you help me understand this for a second? Say <insert the thing that's being discussed here>; what would I see more or less of? Love how such a simple sentence can help turn a vague, fluffy concept into something more concrete that can be used as a basis for an effective conversation. Later on John Cutler explains: Describing actual behaviors can be extremely powerful. It cuts through the context collapse that tends to accompany vague concepts. I found this very effective when trying to push for change such the one outlined in  A Practical, Step-by-Step Guide to Wiring a Winning Organization from the Middle , and in particular this bit on page 131 (emphasis mine): Finally, incorporate into the message proof that these concepts actually work to be prepared to meet those who will oppose you . When leading from t...

Excellent post  ( LinkedIn ) by  Iccha Sethi  tying Engineering Metrics to Business Metrics. The graphics that sums it up is the reproduced on the side (I've remade it using SankeyMATIC  as I felt the original graphics did not make it justice). Interested? Now go read the article, it will be worth your time!

Leadership is achieving results with and through others. Leadership is inspiring others to rise to the best version of themselves.

Caught this passage from  Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself [The Knowledge Project Ep. #208]  (yeah I'm on my fifth listen, and still getting new insights every time). Emphasis mine: One of the things you learn as a project manager, if you’re working with someone who has technical expertise, is that you have to know enough and they have to know that you know enough that they can’t bullshit you. They can’t say, “No, that’s not possible” or “That’s going to take six months” or “That’s going to cost this amount of money.” You have to have enough technical domain expertise that you can push back and get to the truth of things . and, in a nutshell, that explains why it's important to be good at asking questions as a leader, and why knowing what questions to ask is one of the key characteristic of a technical maestro .

A couple years ago I was introduced to semgrep (together with  defectdojo ) but I never really paid much attention to this tool until recently I had an itch to scratch. The itch: all (curl) network calls must always have an associated timeout. This can be (easily) achieved with semgrep using the following rule: Took me a bit of fiddling to find the right pattern incantation, but seems to work. Link to rule in semgrep playground .

I recently mentioned in my best of 2024 this quote from  Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself [The Knowledge Project Ep. #208] : The problem is that the financial upside is always clear. Opportunity costs are sometimes clear, but often not clear. today I read this The Register article about Pat Gelsinger "resignation" from Intel. It mentions some of the opportunity costs that Intel got wrong (in hindsight, and many years later): The Itanium was going to be the high-end architecture, so there was no need for 64 bit extensions to x86, no matter how hard Microsoft asked. AMD disagreed, forcing Intel to grumpily adopt its standard. Atom was going to be the portable processor of choice, so let's flog off the Arm license. I find it always extremely fascinating to read about these stories, and hopefully learn something from them. And I think, in this case, it's really as Ryan Holiday put it: the financial upside is always clear (and sometimes too optimistic) and ...

Podcast Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself [The Knowledge Project Ep. #208] I am sure The Knowledge Project helped me, actually, showed me how to become a better person: at home and at work. This 1h 39' episode is densely packed with life-changing advice. Some quotes from the passages that speak the most to me: You’ve said before that life is always whispering at you, and if you’re not paying attention, it’ll eventually scream at you. Yeah, there’s a Latin expression called festina lente, which just means “to make haste slowly.” We often look for shortcuts, and it takes longer than if we’d just done it slow and steady. And this is a very core idea of Stoicism. Epictetus said, “It’s not things that upset us; it’s our opinion about things.” that’s what sports are; they’re a metaphor for any kind of pursuit of excellence. [Sport] is just the most visible. The problem is that the financial upside is always clear. Opportunity costs are sometimes clear, but often not clear. W...