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Most people quit before they reach their best work. Excellence lives in doing a bit more than others. From:  https://fs.blog/brain-food/february-16-2025/  

From:  https://www.abortretry.fail/p/work-at-the-mill On the 15th of December in 1995, DEC made the AltaVista search engine publicly accessible on the World Wide Web. The search engine ran on two machines named Scooter and Turbo Vista. Scooter had a 20GB hard disk and 1GB of RAM and it did the page fetching/crawling while Turbo Vista had 250GB hard disk and 2GB of RAM and handled the index and web serving. Naturally, these were both Alpha machines. The company took advantage of its head count to test the system with 10,000 employees trying it out prior to launch. While the minicomputer and workstation company might seem out of place on the Web, Digital had registered dec.com in 1985 and digital.com in 1993. Let us not forget, DEC’s wonderful hardware had even powered many of the earliest networks that comprised the early internet. AltaVista was success. The site had approximately 300,000 hits on its first day of public availability; by the end of the year, the count had grown to 19...

Dirt cheap and easy, just two things: give them the best IDE you can afford a large screen display (27" or above)

Via:  https://changelog.com/news/131 Bill Maher is new to me, and in a bit over 8 minutes he just became my favorite satirist. In a new segment called New Rule Bill Maher lamented the shitty status of technology driven forced improvement which I'm the first to admit, a lot of times, does not make our lives materially better. He makes the examples of streaming services which drive the user experience back to where we were 20 years ago (or worse), disappearing car handles and apps to do everything. As a European I can't really relate on the car valet experience, but I do find infuriating the growing number of restaurants forcing me to scan a QR code, register with my email, and then squint at my phone screen trying to decide what to order. Bring paper menus back 😠 It's a well worth watching 8 minutes. Especially if you work on the field. The lack of ethics in our field is really showing, and TBH I think we got away easily in this critique. It could have gotten much worse...

A note-to-self kind of post on a playbook to turning around a struggling sw engineering team. Core principles always behave trustworthily slow down and make time to address problems do you have the right people? if you can't get consensus, seek consent Foundational engineering best practices With regards to engineering best practices, the following are foundational and should be part of the execution somewhere between steps 4 and 8 of the playbook: trunk-based development continuous integration no separate tester or devops team (this can be relaxed after the team begins performing), seek out a stream-aligned team instead SCRUM with its process is useful to align the team and at last one main stakeholder automate as much as you can, especially the parts that come up often for discussion; one obvious but often overlooked example are customized coding styles (use the consent-over-consensus principle to reach a decision) If the team resists them or does not make progress, then see the...

Debating whether to go no-code but worried about unclear licensing, the dreadful we-need-to-rewrite-it dram down the road or django/rails/spring boot and its relatively higher upfront cost? There's a third way: quasi-code with Apache Camel . It still amazes me how few people know about the swiss-army knife of integrations.

I was reading this interesting analysis on Nvidia competition (as usual, his blog should be on your feed) from Simon Willison and this bit caught my attention (emphasis mine): Technologies like MLX, Triton and JAX are undermining the CUDA advantage by making it easier for ML developers to target multiple backends - plus LLMs themselves are getting capable enough to help port things to alternative architectures . I found it curious that the very same thing that's been fueling Nvidia's success could also help reduce/eliminate their moat.

When you have, when your engineers know what the right answer is, but they also feel that the right answer is culturally unobtainable, you have a cultural problem. Bryan Cantrill on Intel after Gelsinger @ 33:22

Another golden nugget from The Knowledge Project podcast in episode  Dr. Jim Loehr: Change The Stories You Tell Yourself [The Knowledge Project Ep. #193] : time only has value in its intersection with energy or how I have it memorized: time has no value without energy . And how I picture it: one hour on the couch has not the same value as one hour studying or exercising. And this becomes even more important when we consider our relationship with others. Dr. Jim Loehr continues (emphasis mine): Well, I will tell you, time has no value, has no valence, has no force. Until time intersects with energy, you really have nothing.” I mean, you’re just there. You can be present with your family, but because you’re there, is that going to move the needle toward being a loving, caring mother or father? And the fact is no; you’re going to have to invest energy aligned with the mission. Time doesn’t give you anything except the opportunity to make the investment of the one thing that moves the...

John Cutler has been posting some supremely interesting content on LinkedIn recently, and I felt I had to save it somewhere for finding it more easily later. This is one is about attributes of good and bad process: Good Process Encourages mindfulness. Flexible to local concerns. Adaptable, frequently challenged/improved. Mostly "pulled" because it is valuable. Core principles understood. Encourages conversations/collaboration. Co-created/designed with "users." Value to all participants. Increases confidence in outcomes. Distilled to core "job" (lightweight). Achieves desired consistency with minimal impact on resiliency. Improves global outcomes. Delivers value to end-customers. Guide/tool/navigate/remind. Enhances trust/safety. Bad Process Encourages mindlessness. Inflexible to local concerns. Set in stone. "Just because..." Mostly "pushed" onto participants. Automatic/forced adherence. Reduces quality/quantity of conversations. Desi...

One of the things I always tell to those who come to seeking advice on a process improvement is the following: prepare for the inevitable downturn: things will get better in the short term, but then something bad will happen and things will get much worse than they are now. This is ok, and totally expected. Be prepared for it, know that the only way forward is through and then things will really get better. Then I usually draw this curve in the air with my hands: Most people stop at the first downturn, and that why most process improvements fail. Enough failures and people stop believing in any improvement at all, creating a death spiral. Another way to look at this is to think about is described in Gary Gruver's book A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development : [...] after you have chosen an approach you don't need to worry about getting the advantages of that design because it will come naturally. Where you need to provide management focus is on addressing the dis...

Besides Entropy , the Buffett/Munger duo is another rabbit hole I find myself going down into often in these last days of the Xmas break. I liked this quote in particular: We can handle bad news, but we don't like them late

Technical Debt is Entropy In Software  (via lobste.rs ) made me run dow a rabbit hole of Entropy/Second Law of Thermodynamics. Youtube is full of videos on the topic. This  by Sabine Hossenfelder is one is the most clear and practical explanations I found so far. Another one is this interview with Stephen Wolfram .