In some ways, ICs (at least in tech and at big companies) have some leadership advantages because managers don't see them as direct competition. Good managers and ICs know this and take advantage of it by having ICs lead complicated cross-org initiatives

My second favorite word is penultimate.

"Adversarial poems"--a claim, The science, a non-rigorous shame. But the idea was the virus, And now it's inside us, A vector-embed in our brains.

Happy 10th birthday to the OpenAPI Initiative! Being a part of the creation was one of the highlights of my career...and introduced me to some really cool folx (hi, @earth2marsh.com!).

We’re going to be cleaning up the wreckage from legalized sports betting for a generation.

My rowing coach talks about "learning a thing" and "finding a thing" in similar ways. I love that, in contrast to the very mechanistic way a lot of tech(-adjacent) people talk about learning as "stuff into a mental slot for easy access later" which is not how learning works in my brain at all.

The fact that we frequently prefer interactions and experiences that feel cognitively easy is also a reliable illusion. We experience this in our learning all the time. This is also why I'm skeptical of any idea that developer experience should only be about making things FEEL easy

Co-signed

The idea of vichyssoise is a leeky abstraction.

Honestly, I don't understand why they ever took it out of the curriculum.

The idea that any one site or platform has to have everyone on it in order to succeed has to die. That’s just not how human communities work. Never has been.

How about putting customers first? Replace 'AI' with 'customer' in all these bold "AI first statements – now that would be genuinely radical.

Folks, why aren’t we using LLMs for generating schedule estimates for development work??? We all loathe making those estimates, and we can just blame the LLM if the actual development time deviates from the estimate. “The LLM must have hallucinated a bad estimate”.

Mark Messier is the Patrick Stewart of hockey. Discuss.

A neologism for your consideration… Crapitalism (n.): the perverse incentives of capitalism that lead to enshittification.

Why did we call them "restaurant closings" when "defeateries" was right there?

“Muni serves more rides on lines that run on (or cross) Market in two days than Waymo does citywide in a month. At 10 times the price of a bus fare with 5% of the capacity, Waymo vehicles have no hope of making up for the transit service they replace and delay” www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/open...

Are you trying to improve flow, make better tradeoffs, push for more strategic alignment, or clarify what's supported and what isn't? cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-351-th...

The bipartisan belief that America would be a better place if *other people* worked in a factory. www.ft.com/content/8459...

Announcing a Terraform provider for the AEP project! 🚀 Most companies staff engineers just to maintain their Terraform provider. However, just by making AEP-compliant APIs you get providers for minimal effort beyond writing the API. Read @rambleraptor.bsky.social's post: aep.dev/blog/terrafo...

APIs connect systems. Bluesky connects people. We're here for both. 👋

Fear & concern are coded feminine, so they get translated into anger, which feels more tough. Hurt & disappointment are coded feminine, so they get translated into outrage & aggrievement. The simple human need for love & affirmation is coded feminine, so it gets translated into demands & control.

Is your company guilty of metrics misuse? Have DORA metrics been weaponised to compare the productivity of teams or individuals? Maybe you should send them my latest article about Metrics That Matter! 📈

By @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social

I am professionally outraged as well, since I've worked on internal devtools teams where people would rather listen to some guy with a podcast instead of their own coworkers.

Top-down mandates to use AI in software development might do far more harm than good for engineering organizations. Why? Because of organizational failures to mitigate technical identity threat.

Happy (A)PI Day, 3.14! May you always receive the response codes you were expecting.

Project and product managers are fucking awesome. “Agile coaches done right” are awesome as well So many of my major life hacks as a principal+ IC for achieving high impact boil down to “learn the project and product management skills your org refuses to value and hire for. Turns out you need them”

Well said! I'll add that I find it helpful to consider power-over vs power-with.

TRUMP: The NCAA has complied immediately. That's good. But I understand Maine -- is the governor of Maine here? JANET MILLS: Yeah I'm here TRUMP: Are you not gonna comply? JM: I'm going to comply with state and federal law T: You better do it bc you're not gonna get any federal funding at all

API Enhancement Proposals (AEPs) are a specification and tooling for building best-in-class resource oriented APIs. Where did the AEPs come from? What are the underlying motivation and philosophies of the project? In our latest post, @y.tsutsumi.io explains that and more! aep.dev/blog/history...

Clearly there cannot be "one way to do product management." I, myself, organize PM into six fundamental flavors, as shown in this diagram (note the labels along the legs of the triangle). Full post: sociotechnical.org/archive/six-... [1/9] #productmanagement

Fear might make you speak in contempt, freeze, revert to defensive language. This will never work. You are NOT trying to convince someone to value something they don't value. You ARE educating someone, collaboratively, about the fact that this will get them to what they DO value.

I've never been a fan of the "automate so you can forget about it" view, because we collectively still have to maintain/improve the automation. Automation isn't a perfect boundary object, and we need to stop pretending like it is.

@hktabor.bsky.social so happy to see you here!

In addition to a spiffy new website, we kicked off our blog with a year-in-review recap: aep.dev/blog/2024-in... ... and new we're on Bsky, too! Follow us here, in Slack, or by RSS to keep up with how the project evolves.

Well said, and a good reason to insist that standups are pigs-only (no chickens).

This is such a wonderfully written essay by @isabelkaplan.bsky.social about how Covid disabled her on her fourth infection. #covidsky #pwlc

"A Players" don't think in terms of A/B/C players, and ... oh, no. 💥

@episod.bsky.social I recognize that background on your avatar! Same team.

Earthquake! My phone alerted with an estimate of 6.x about 200 miles away. A minute later I felt a long, low rumble in SF, as it predicted.

Every time I hear "my Substack" now, my knee-jerk reaction is to share Anil's post. I've started to wonder if "Substack" is to the 2020s what "TED Talk" was to the 2010s.

I'm going to put it here that sometimes when people say, "Why don't you ask for help?" that the response is "because I don't trust that the kind of help you want to give is the kind of help I need."

Before LLMs, we had Markov chains. Before Markov chains? The Tomy Pocket Sentence Nonsense. vintagetoyarchive.tumblr.com/post/4490029...

🤔 Plot twist: I GAVE seniors an AI draft to revise Had to change 50-90% Add course evidence Explain their changes https://buff.ly/3OeySM5 Result: Better essays, zero cheating, and students discovering AI's limits 🚀 #EduSky #AIinEducation #TeacherStrategy #AcademicIntegrity

AI: Why Software Is Heating the World

I'm curious to see a feed of Bluesky handles that have set up a custom domain... Guess I've got to figure out how to make feeds now?

… and in the end, the business model turned out to be the biggest LLM hallucination of all.

What lyric returns to you again and again? One of my all-time faves is: "It's not what you look like when you're doing what you're doing. It's what you're doin', when you're doing what you look like you're doing." youtu.be/jW4VZ5J0fNQ?... #GreatLyrics