Minto Pyramid

In business, communication needs to be clear and efficient. People are busy and don’t have time to read long walls of text or listen to long presentations where the key info is shared at the very end.

Use the Minto Pyramid to give your communication a top-down structure and get your message across quickly and clearly. Lead with the conclusion, then provide key arguments and finally support them with detailed information.

How to Size and Assess Teams From an Eng Lead at Stripe, Uber and Digg | First Round Review

Say your startup has an on-call rotation that follows the sun. Someone’s always on. One day, a member of your team gets an alert that disk space will run out on the primary PostgreSQL server in two hours. An hour later, he gets another page. Then thirty minutes later, disk space runs out and your entire site goes down. For 18 hours. The silver lining is that your two-tier architecture can keep your site and app online, but the backend of your business has come to a halt. Your CTO is furious. He says you must fire the engineer who was on call to make a point.

The baseline for web development in 2022 – LINE ENGINEERING

**TL;DR:**The baseline for web development in 2022 is: low-spec Android devices in terms of performance, Safari from two years before in terms of Web Standards, and 4G in terms of networks. The web in general is not answering those needs properly, especially in terms of performance where factors such as an over-dependence on JavaScript are hindering our sites’ performance.

Hello there! I’m Alan Dávalos, a front-end engineer at LINE. You might have thought this article’s title is just clickbait but bear with me for a while, I promise it’s worth it. The main reason for that is that there were some big changes in the web between 2021 and 2022 and those affect the way we should face web development as a whole.

Your guide to self-serve onboarding: How to get your product to sell itself – OpenView

In a self-serve environment, your product has to sell itself.

The first-day experience is the most critical part of the user journey. And it’s where most products fall flat.

It’s on the first day that you have a user’s full attention and you have an extremely narrow window to impress them.

Why should you care?

The Three Altitudes of Leadership | INSEAD Knowledge

High altitudes hold a special place in the history of human achievement. We remember Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepalese sherpa, Tenzing Norgay as the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Other altitude pioneers include Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, the first human to fly in outer space, and Neil Armstrong, the first person on the moon. More recently, in 2012, Austrian Felix Baumgartner skydived from a capsule at 127,000 feet.

Managing Managers: Words of Wisdom From Experienced Engineering Executives

I recently stepped into the role of Director of Engineering at Lemonade

Though I’ve been leading teams for quite a few years now, managing managers is a new challenge.

Left to right: Eti Noked, Shay Cohen, and Anton Drukh.

I turned to managers of managers, whom I value and don’t work with on a daily basis, to gain a wider perspective on what it takes to succeed in this role:

Everything Must Be Paid for Twice

One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice.

There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale.

But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.

Memo: China Strategy Revisited

This is a continuation of the original essay: The China Strategy (2018)

At 8 am on May 10, 2003, Taobao went online on the fourth day of the SARS quarantine. The homepage read: “Think of those who start a business in trying times.” Nineteen years later, and China’s online retail economy is the envy of the world. Currently with a nearly 37% online penetration and growing, analysts estimate that rate will reach 63.9% by 2023. It’s evident that online retailers like Alibaba, which owns Taobao, used the crisis to move China into eCommerce leadership that then belonged to the United States. China owes its eCommerce dominance to Alibaba, but its future may be with JD.com. This as the U.S. Government is becoming increasingly adversarial with Alibaba.

The Power Of An API

Hugging the X-Axis

I’ve always struggled with commitment. In a world as grand as ours, shouldn’t we try to experience it all? Change it up. Visit every country. Try a bunch of careers. The menu of life is vast, and it’d be a shame to only order a single entrée.

When I say I was allergic to restraint, I mean it. I was the tantrum-throwing 3rd grader who refused to RSVP to birthday parties because I didn’t want to be tied down on a Saturday afternoon. Early in my career, I was also the guy who kept up with ten different industries so I wouldn’t have to define myself by any single one of them. But recently, my values have started to change. I now want multi-decade friendships and a professional life where I can build things that compound in value at an exponential rate; I want a place I call home and a large family I can share that home with; and I want to become an expert in the ideas that resonate with me most instead of suffering from shiny object syndrome.

Reborn in the cloud | McKinsey

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Over the past five years, Adobe Systems has remade itself as a cloud company. It no longer offers its publishing and design tools in the form of physical, shrink-wrapped products to be deployed at customers’ sites under a perpetual

license—where customers pay once and can use the software indefinitely. Rather, customers subscribe to Creative Cloud, the company’s online suite of publishing and design tools, and receive frequent software upgrades as well as a range of new online-only and mobile services.

(2022) 13 Best Asynchronous Communication Tools for Remote Teams – NoHQ Remote Work Guides

Day-to-day communication happens asynchronously when working with a remote team. While startups try to conquer the synchronous space, there is far less work happening on the other side. Let’s look at 13 of the best tools for asynchronous work.

The Classic: Slack

With asynchronous communication apps, there’s the well-known combination of Slack + Zoom. The two tools perfectly complement each other and make synchronous and asynchronous communication perfectly.

The Best Leaders are Feedback Magnets — Here’s How to Become One

Introduction

This article is written by Shivani Berry**, founder and CEO of Ascend**, which offers online leadership programs to empower women from top companies with the skills and community to advance into management. Previously, she was at PayPal, Intercom, and GetYourGuide.

After interviewing dozens of top executives in fireside chats — including Kim Scott of Radical Candor fame — I started to notice a pattern. Even though they were all well-practiced with tons of public speaking experience under their belts, every single one of them asked me for feedback after the event. That’s when it hit me: The best leaders are feedback magnets. Getting actionable feedback is a skill, and the top performers have excelled largely because they’ve never stopped honing it.

Managing Managers: Words of Wisdom From Experienced Engineering Executives

I Asked Managers of Managers I Look Up To for Advice As I Transitioned From Team Lead to Director of Engineering

Daniel Korn

Jan 5·7 min read

I recently stepped into the role of Director of Engineering at Lemonade. Though I’ve been leading teams for quite a few years now, managing managers is a new challenge.

Left to right: Eti Noked, Shay Cohen, and Anton Drukh.

Tweet from Marc Hedlund

I’m often asked how best to interview VP Engineering or other engineering leadership candidates. It’s a hard problem. One of my standard answers seems to work for a lot of people, so here it is.

I think it matters a lot to probe for a leadership candidate’s beliefs about their ability to create change. There are plenty of passive managers: hire to budget, run the standup, file the performance report, repeat. A leader should not be passive.

Cost of (Employee) Attrition

What if we could visualise the cost of attrition?

Here’s a team. Someone leaves. We hire a replacement.
We get lucky and manage to find someone more skilled. Looks like we’re better off?

Really when someone leaves we lose all the relationships they had with the rest of the team as well. The team is a diminished more like 40% than the apparent 20% by their loss. It takes longer to rebuild the team than is apparent. Relationships take time.

(2022) How to Do Employee Performance Reviews Virtually & Best Practices – NoHQ Remote Work Guides

Measuring job performance is an essential practice when measuring a business. They provide valuable metrics that provide insight into the employee’s skill and cost value.

Many employees scoff at the idea of performance reviews because they feel they are not appropriately appraised of nonperformance factors.

Therefore, in an employee performance review, it’s important to only review based on performance and nothing that can get the business in trouble with the courts based on protections under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Changing Lanes – Becoming a Platform Product Manager

I’m a product manager for a content management system that runs some of the most-visited websites in the world. Our team reports to the CTO, and we sit within the engineering arm of the organization. Prior to this I’d had a year’s product experience at a customer-facing SaaS company and naively I believed I could copy-paste this experience. I was wrong. At its heart a CMS is a platform, not a product. I quickly found that I needed to become a platform product manager.

Measuring KPIs for a Platform vs a Revenue-Generating Product

There are some important differences between managing a solutions vs a platform product, in terms of providing product value. One of the key differences is in how you determine and track valuable key performance indicators (KPIs).

This post focuses on the differences for managing KPIs not just for platforms overall, but for content management systems – products used by web sites to build their content, which include the tools that editors use to publish content to the site.

Measuring output, outcomes and impact in platform teams at Adevinta

What we learned from implementing a metrics-based approach to measure results in a platform team

Adevinta May 20, 2021 · 8 min read

By Xavier Gumara Rigol (Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn), Senior Engineering Manager for Experimentation and Analytics Solutions at Adevinta

As a manager of an internal platform team at Adevinta (that is, a team whose customers are other employees at the company) it has been hard to deliver results in our team by following a metrics-driven approach. This has been accentuated by the fact that our platforms can be used by employees from our marketplaces around the world.

25 Habits of Highly Effective Managers

Introduction

Management can at times seem like staring down a large block of marble — an intimidating task that requires the right tools. And in our experience, most management advice tends to focus on tackling the biggest chunks: assembling high-performing teams through hiring, delivering tough feedback and checking in regularly. Of course, holding regular 1:1 meetings and honest performance reviews are critical items on your manager checklist to get right — but sculpting a magnificent piece of art also relies on the finer chiseling work of shaping that rock, bit by bit. After all, it’s the smallest movements and the intricate detail work that makes a statue worthy of display in a museum. However, this tends to be overlooked.

# 6 A Strategy for Each Swimlane

How to define the strategies, proxy metrics, and projects for each pod

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·3 min read

The “Ratings Wizard,” part of an explicit taste strategy, collected many ratings in the late 2000s.

So far, I have focused on defining the overall product strategy for a company. It’s essential that each product leader within an organization also articulate their pod’s strategy. I’ll provide an example from the personalization team at Netflix, circa 2006. At the time, Todd Yellin was the product leader of a group of engineers, designers, and data analysts. (Today, Todd is VP of Product Innovation at Netflix.)

#7 The Product Roadmap

A roadmap is an expression of your strategy. It shows how projects fit together, along with a rough time estimate

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·3 min read

I’m a lover of Bojack Horseman.

Roadmaps are a richly debated topic. On the one hand, they help teams to see how all the projects fit together. And with technology teams, who have long lead-time projects, it’s good to have advance notice of upcoming projects. On the other hand, a four-quarter roadmap provides false confidence, given uncertainty about what will work or not. It’s especially hard to guess the timing of projects, given this uncertainty.

#4 Proxy Metrics

How to define a metric to prove or disprove your hypotheses and measure progress

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·6 min read

At Netflix, the metric we used to evaluate overall product quality was monthly retention. This high-level product engagement metric improved significantly over twenty years. In the early days, about 10% of members canceled each month. In 2005 the monthly cancel rate was around 4.5%. Today, it’s close to 2%.

#2 From DHM to Product Strategy

You have ideas to delight customers, to build hard to copy advantages and experiment with your business model. Now what?

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·5 min read

In 2007, Netflix’s exclusive content effort, “Red Envelope Studios,” failed. But by 2012, with its economies of scale, Netflix had a hard to copy advantage through its original content.

The next step is to tease out high-level hypotheses that combine delight, hard to copy advantage, and margin. Achieving two or three of these objectives with a single strategy is at the heart of an effective product strategy.

#1 The DHM Model

Product strategy answers the question, “How will your product delight customers, in hard to copy, margin-enhancing ways?”

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·6 min read

The audience at my Product Strategy Workshop at TomTom in Amsterdam

When I join a company as a product leader, advisor, or board member, I brainstorm ideas to answer three questions:

1. How will the product delight customers?

2. What will make the product hard to copy?

   (more…)

#3 The Strategy/Metric/Tactic Lockup

How to assign metrics and tactics to each product strategy.

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·2 min read

Learning comes from equal part success and failure. Above, John Oliver reflects on Netflix’s failed attempt to separate its DVD-by-mail and streaming services, and the failure of “Qwikster.”

In 2005, Netflix explored six key product strategies. For each strategy, we had a team focused on experiments to prove or disprove each theory. Here’s the 2005 high-level product strategy for Netflix, coupled with metrics and tactics/projects:

#5 Working Bottom-up

Scan your project list to identify themes and define your product strategy.

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·2 min read

Teams at Glassdoor define their product strategy at one of my Product Strategy workshops.

The key to the Strategy/Metric/Tactic lockup is to identify a high-level product strategy, assign a proxy metric to measure the strategy’s effectiveness, then brainstorm a set of projects that will move the metric. If you get “stuck,” however, sometimes it helps to turn this process on its head.

#10 The Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting

#10 How to Run A Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting

How to keep strategy “front and center” and accelerate both results & learning.

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·6 min read

That’s me, many years ago at the end of a Netflix Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting. (Photo: Michael Rubin.)

As companies grow, one of the critical challenges is to keep everyone aligned. Product strategy helps folks to stay on the same page, but I’ve learned to overcommunicate to ensure the strategy is fully understood and remembered. My peers describe my communication style as “Lather, Rinse, Repeat,” which is a fair assessment.

#8 The GLEe Model. A long-term, phased approach to create… | by Gibson Biddle | Medium

A long-term phased approach to crafting a product vision.

Gibson Biddle

Jul 12, 2019·6 min read

I confess. One of my guilty pleasures on Netflix is “Glee.”

As companies grow, there are a few common criticisms about the product strategy:

• Teams see and understand the projects, but not how they fit together.
• Investors complain that there’s not a big enough product vision.
• The product team feels too focused on the short-term.

The GLEe model helps product leaders to form a product vision to address these criticisms. The model encourages teams to think big, think long-term, and describes a phased, step-by-step approach to build a product that “dents the universe.”

#9 The GEM Model

Prioritizing growth, engagement, and monetization to keep organizations aligned.

Gibson Biddle

Jul 12, 2019·3 min read

That’s me, explaining the GEM model at our Product Leader Summit in 2018, using Chegg as an example.

As companies grow, product strategy helps teams maintain focus. But misalignment, especially across product, marketing, sales, and finance, happens often. One of the biggest causes is differing opinions on how to prioritize growth, engagement, and monetization. The GEM model forces cross-functional teams to prioritize these factors and helps build a metrics-focused organization.

The Mysterious Story of the Man from Taured | by Trevor Mahoney | Predict | Medium

If you woke up one morning and started to go about your business, only to realize a few small things weren’t quite right, what would you do?

Your warm coffee maker has been replaced with a metallic looking object with a green liquid inside. You could have…

100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying

1 Exercise on a Monday night (nothing fun happens on a Monday night).

2 On the fence about a purchase? Wait 72 hours before you buy it.

3 Tip: the quickest supermarket queue is always behind the fullest trolley (greeting, paying and packing take longer than you think).

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Great Engineering Teams Focus on Milestones Instead of Projects

Most engineering organizations focus on delivering projects. They should focus on milestones instead.

Managing projects is hard. Companies contort themselves to do it well. Instead of playing chess, switch to checkers. Milestones are an easier game, and you get better results.

More importantly, milestones unlock powerful behavior. One example is project shaping. Milestones make it easy to play with the contours of a project.

On Schelling Points in Organizations

Tapping into the emergent undercurrents of coordination

Alex Komoroske

Dec 13, 2021·23 min read

The Coordination Headwind (AKA why organizations are like slime molds, AKA that deck with all of the 🧫🕸🏆) tells the story of how even in the best organizations — with individuals who are good at what they do, hard-working, and collaborative — situations still arise where it’s nearly impossible to get anything done.

Conflict Resolution Diagram | Untools

Handling conflicts carefully is important. Conflict Resolution Diagram (also called “Evaporating Cloud”) is a tool that will help you resolve them peacefully while making sure that needs of both sides are met.

It’s one of the thinking tools developed as part of the Theory of Constraints by Eliyahu Goldratt. Let’s see how it works.

How to use it

The best time to use this tool is when you run into a conflict that seems impossible to resolve by accepting the proposal of either side. This can be a conflict with others but also internal. It can be professional or personal. You can draw the diagram on a whiteboard, piece of paper or run through it in your head.

Hard Edges, Soft Middle

Have you had that feeling of being several weeks into a project, and you find yourself wandering around, struggling to wrangle the scope back to what you thought it was when you started?

It’s an easy trap to fall into. It’s why I’m always thinking about ways to make targets smaller (or closer, if you’re thinking about real physical targets). The bigger and more ambitious you want to be with an objective, the more confidence you need to have that the objective is the right one. What happens often is we decide a project scope — a feature or product prototype we think has legs — but the scope gets bigger than the confidence that we’re right. A few weeks in and there’s hedging, backtracking, redefining. You realize you went down a blind alley that’s hard to double-back on.

Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

Marianne Bellotti

Dec 20, 2021·8 min read

Knowing where to look for problems by figuring out who reports up to whom

“Let’s see…. no backups, twenty convoluted stored procedures and old C++ code”

After a couple years in government I used to blow peoples’ minds with a fairly simple party trick. Before going into our first meeting with a new agency stakeholder I would predict several key details of what their problems were going to be. All I needed was the name and title of the person we were meeting.

Lead by Leading

Managers have to wait for permission, because management requires authority.

But in every area of our lives, if we choose to lead, we can lead. Simply by beginning.

It might be that few will choose to follow, but then we can learn to get better at leading.

First we begin.

The web3 stack: how web3 will offer superior UX than web2 | by Polynya | Medium

Polynya

Oct 30·5 min read

Please note that this is my semi-informed opinion, and only one possible outcome on how web3 plays out.

A lot of web3 skeptics are quick to criticize the terrible UX. Even web3 advocates have often conceded that UX may not be as good, but we’ll make up for it with the nice properties enabled by decentralization. Turns out, all of the building blocks for better UX than web2 already exists, and in this post, I’ll attempt to put it all together to give a clearer vision of one possible outcome where web3 out-UXs web2.

The Eight Archetypes of Leadership

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Although the ghost of the Great Man still haunts leadership studies, most of us have recognized by now that successful organizations are the product of distributive, collective, and complementary leadership. The first step in putting together such a team is to identify each member of the team’s personality makeup and leadership style, so that strengths and competences can be matched to particular roles and challenges. Getting this match wrong can bring misery to all concerned and cause considerable damage.

Employers Want Workers in the Office for the Company Culture, Not Productivity – Bloomberg

Ask executives why they’re desperate to get workers back in offices, and productivity—the corporate north star and initial obsession of pandemic anxiety—suddenly has nothing to do with it. Many sound like Judith Carr-Rodriguez, the chief executive officer of FIG, a New York City-based advertising firm. She was shocked at how well things went when her staff of 80 pivoted to remote work; the firm actually grew. Yet, she’s resisting a fully remote future because of the je ne sais quoi of the office. “I know people are being productive,” she says. “But are they learning, growing, being challenged? I worry we’re creating a culture where people are not exposing themselves in ways they would be in the office.”

Remote Work Should Be (Mostly) Asynchronous

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Digital transformation should be a means to an end, but it often gets mistaken for an end in itself. This is partly why 70% of all digital transformation efforts fail — because they’re done purely for the sake of going digital without full consideration of the bigger picture.

The pandemic accelerated many trends, from streaming, e-commerce, and food delivery platforms to the widespread adoption of remote work. But instead of taking advantage of this opportunity to improve how we work, most organizations simply took their offices online, along with the bad habits that permeated them.

You Can’t Optimize For Rest

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. In this installment I write a bit about burnout, exhaustion, and rest. It doesn’t end with any neat solutions, but that’s kind of the point. However, I’ll take up the theme again in the next installment, and will hopefully end on a more promising note.

As many of you know, the newsletter operates on a patronage model. The writing is public, there is no paywall, but I welcome the support of readers who value the work. Not to be too sentimental about it, but thanks to those who have become paying subscribers this newsletter has become a critical part of how I make my living. And for that I’m very grateful. Recently, a friend inquired about one-time gifts as the year draws to a close, however this platform doesn’t allow that option. So for those who would like to support the Convivial Society but for whom the usual subscription rates are a bit too steep, here’s a 30% discounted option that works out to about $31 for the year or about $2.50 a month. The option is good through the end of December. Cheers!

My Smart Home 2021

Hi! It’s me, Joris.

It looks like I’ve linked you here myself. Linking people to a blogpost I wrote is often a bit

akward, especially at work.

I likely shared this blog in an attempt to further a conversation. Usually the post does a better

job at succinctly sharing information

than I could by talking.

In any case, I hope me sharing this post doesn’t come across as

Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet?

In the early days of the pandemic, Matt Mullenweg didn’t move to a compound in Hawaii, bug out to a bunker in New Zealand or head to Miami and start shilling for crypto. No, in the early days of the pandemic, Mullenweg bought an RV. He drove it all over the country, bouncing between Houston and San Francisco and Jackson Hole with plenty of stops in national parks. In between, he started doing some tinkering.

Metrics-Driven Product Development Is Hard

The way that the FAANG companies use metrics to build products is vital to their success. They invest an army of people and homegrown tools to pull it off. My last article, Balancing short-term and long-term product bets, describes Google’s process.

While the very top companies are great at using metrics, after talking to the hundreds of PMs who signed up for DoubleLoop, I’ve learned that almost everyone else is struggling.

Intent Matters in Product Development – by Alex Johnson

My favorite fintech product of all time was a mobile wallet, launched by Square in 2011. Originally called Card Case (and later Square Wallet), the app created a startlingly seamless and enjoyable mobile payments experience.

Here’s how it worked:

• A consumer downloaded the Card Case app to their smartphone and was able to see a map of all the nearby merchants that were using Square’s POS Register.
• In the app, the consumer was able to look up information on these merchants (operating hours, menus, special offers, etc.) and choose to ‘open a tab’ at any merchant that they wanted to shop with.
• When the consumer visited a merchant that they had an open tab with, the merchant’s Square POS Register would automatically detect their smartphone (using geofencing) and would pop up the consumer’s name and face on the screen.
• When the consumer was ready to make a purchase, all they had to do was give the cashier their name to complete the transaction.
• In the background, Square would charge the card on file, send the consumer a digital receipt, and give them the option of adding a tip.

OOPS Writeups

A couple of people have asked me to share how I structure my OOPS write-ups. Here’s what they look like when I write them. This structure in this post is based on the OOPS template that has evolved over time inside of Netflix, with contributions from current and former members of the CORE team.

My personal outline looks like this (the bold sections are the ones that I include in every writeup)

Is Crypto Bullshit?

Planet-wrecking money laundry or the next phase of human evolution? Why not both?

As you may have gathered from my previous post, I’ve become interested in cryptocurrency and blockchain regulation. I’ve honestly been a little hesitant to write about this stuff because opinions on the subject are oddly polarized. I know I’ve got crypto-skeptical readers, followers and friends who would be exasperated if I suddenly started spouting off about it all the time. Last week, Venkatesh Rao noted the hostile reaction after tweeting about minting his first NFT (non-fungible token):

Agility ≠ Speed

Software development benefits from a sense of direction

Kevlin Henney

10 hours ago·9 min read

This article first appeared in Tips From The agile Trenches

I was changing a lightbulb this morning and was struck by a shift that has occurred in recent years. Lightbulbs used to be sold according to their power consumption. People were entrained to buy bulbs according to power rating — what the bulb consumed from the electrical grid — rather than brightness — what they, as consumers, actually benefited from.

Why Trying to Clean Up All the Ocean Plastic Is Pointless

Time Management – Paolo Belcastro

Becoming a CTO – Puppies, Flowers, Rainbows and Kittens

A New Way to Think About Product-Market Fit

I made my team waste two years of their lives building and refining the wrong product. Yes, we had a good time and we learned a few things, but nobody wishes to spend two grueling years on something that doesn’t matter.

What went wrong? I had an oversimplified understanding of product-market fit. And there’s a chance that you do too.

If you’re looking for product-market fit, by the end of this article you’ll have a better chance of finding it.

My Software Estimation Technique – Jacob Kaplan-Moss

My Software Estimation Technique

Last time, I explained that, although estimating software project timelines is hard, you should do it anyway. With that background, I want to go into some detail and share the technique I use when I need to develop a project timeline.

The critical characteristic: capture time and uncertainty

This isn’t an area where I think there’s a “correct” technique; this is one system that works well for me, and I’ve been able to teach others to use it successfully. There are any number of other systems that might work as well; .

How 3D Printing Could Change the Future of Gear

You don’t have to be able to follow the intricately complex plot threads of HBO’s hit sci-fi series Westworld — who can? — to see the hypothetical picture in its fabric: by the early 2050s, theme park robots will be so lifelike that it’ll be impossible to tell the difference between them and us. Though not inherently a problem, their verisimilitude will complicate matters when a few become sentient and decide to take over.

What Would It Look Like If We Treated Climate Change as an Actual Emergency? ❧ Current Affairs

As the dust settles on COP26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, the results do not look good. Despite a flurry of headline-grabbing pledges, national commitments bring us nowhere near to meeting the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees. According to Climate Action Tracker, 73% of existing “net-zero” pledges are weak and inadequate—“lip service to climate action.” What is more, a yawning gap remains between pledges, which are easy enough to make, and actual policies, which are all that really count. You can pledge all you like, but what we need is action. Right now existing government policies have us hurtling toward 2.7 degrees of heating in the coming decades.

The Worst of Both Worlds: Zooming From the Office – The New York Times

Work life for many is in a mushy middle ground, and what’s at stake isn’t just who is getting talked over in meetings. It’s whether flexibility is sustainable, even with all the benefits it confers.

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  As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

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Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You

When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending each other spreadsheets, and they realize that there’s a general pattern: sending files. That’s one level of abstraction already. Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also “send” requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method on an object is like sending a message to an object! It’s the same thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it’s getting really vague and nobody really knows what they’re talking about any more. Blah.

Free software maintenance – Adding Features

This was written sometime in 2004, I think

How does the maintainer of a free software project decide which features to

add? The guiding principle is simple: ask “why,” rather than “why not.”

Let’s start with some mails from Linus Torvalds on the subject,

since people are more likely to listen to him than me:

here

and here

(local mirror if the links died).

All code is presumed harmful, because it will have bugs and

How Product Engineering Teams Avoid Dependencies — The Independent Executor Model

What is the Independent Executor model?

It is natural to need things from other teams. It can be tempting to wait for them or depend on them to provide something for you. This happens because they own the area you need to do work in.

For example, you might need a team to add a field into their API. Or you might need them to build a new API for you. Sometimes without these changes, you can’t deliver what you need to.

MTTR Is a Misleading Metric—Now What?

By Courtney Nash | November 4, 2021

12 minute read

Editor’s note: This is the second part of a series that will focus on each one of The VOID Report 2021 key findings. If you haven’t had a chance to download the report, it’s not too late. You can download the report at thevoid.community/report.

Software organizations tend to value measurement, iteration, and improvement based on data. These are great things for an organization to focus on; however, this has led to an industry practice of calculating and tracking Mean Time to Resolve, or MTTR. While it’s understandable to want to have a clear metric for tracking incident resolution, MTTR is problematic for a couple of reasons.