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| 2025-02-09 | 2025-02-23 |
This week I was travelling, which left me a lot of extra time for reading!
- The Engineering Manager Substack, by James Stanier. I read some of the following articles after feeling some tension in the project lifecycle at work:
- Parkinson’s Law: It’s Real, So Use It, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” so set challenging, achievable deadlines!
- The Disappointment Frontier, a framework for managing disappointment to balance delivery with expectations. Keep it small, and the team will be jerked around frequently as expectations change. Keep it too large, and it will backfire when all of the disappointment catches up with you.
- Gather, decide, execute, a way to model work which applies to both organized, professional tasks but also personal knowledge management.
- Legend of the Whispering Earring, a short story which serves as an allegory for adoption of AI, where users of the earring lead successful lives but become philosophical zombies. Despite being an AI skeptic, I recognize there’s value in adopting these powerful tools. But we should avoid becoming overreliant on them.
- Product Development Processes You Might Not have Heard of, another reaction to tension at work. These processes show some other ways to plan and deliver work compared to Scrum.
- It’s Time for a United Front to Take on Billionaire Rule, a call to action, rather than reaction, in response to the rampage on the working class by the current US administration. Despite the various ideological divides among the working class, we must form a coherent front against corporate ownership of our government.
- Rust is Eating JavaScript, an analysis of how common parts of the JavaScript like bundling, transpilation, and linting are being replaced by Rust.
- So many unmarried men, how Western philosopher Mary Midgely called out blind spots in modern philosophy due to all of the prominent scholars being bachelors. Ironically, much of her work didn’t get big for the same reasons — that she was a woman with children.
- The Second Brain of Simon Späti, a great example of how to organize both personal knowledge and longer-scale blog posts. In my opinion, some of the content can be a bit self-indulgent, but I think the site serves as a great possible framework to aim for.
- It’s a knowledge problem! Or is it? A short analysis on incentive-oriented systems and how knowledge gaps are frequently cited as the cause, but digging into the actual incentives can better showcase why people actually act a certain way. For example, developers typically push “bad” code to meet deadlines, not because they don’t realize it’s bad code.
- Sieg heil Tesla, the irony that German protestors are being prosecuted for Nazi sympathism after displaying a picture of Elon Musk’s salute on a factory, but mainstream media refuses to call his gesture such.
- Big Tech Has Disrupted the Social Contract, how the “app-share” market has eroded the trust between the Service industry and its users. In particular, automated systems prioritize making money above all else, often to the cost of users rather than businesses.