OpenAI released GPT-4. I’m intrigued by the potential of being able to take a photo of my fridge and get suggestions of what to make for dinner. Even better would be if it could suggest how to tidy up the mess in there and let me know which jars of pickles and salsa should really be biffed.

I love Uses This. Daniel Bogan finds people from a huge range of jobs and asks them four questions: Who are you, and what do you do? What hardware do you use? And what software? It’s a perfect site for finding rabbit holes to go down.

In On Code Coverage Tools, Chelsea Troy argues for framing coder coverage as a satisficing metric as opposed to an optimizing metric so that you consider the context and relative value of your tests rather than just aiming to improve the coverage number.

Rands: Seven Plus or Minus Three

A common question I am asked, “How big should the team be?” My immediate response: Seven plus or minus three. There is a not a lot of hard theory behind this guideline, just common sense.

Everything That’s Ever Gone Wrong on My Camping Trips. Exercises in resilience, including a dog fighting a bear, sand fleas, losing your friends in the wilderness, and terrible french bread.

Neal Stephenson’s recent keynote at D.I.C.E is titled “Games and the Open Metaverse” and is retitled “Blah blah Metaverse blah blah blah” by Stephenson in the first five seconds. He goes on to talk about the different kinds of markets for things like books and video games, and why we feel icky when the intangible value for goods isn’t part of the discussion. Stephenson talks about the value of ensuring that financialization of things like games needs to come out of the experience and quotes Rebecca Barkin on this point: “You can’t architect a compelling experience backward from a desired financial outcome.”

I maintain a short list of books that I call The Engineering Manager’s bookshelf. I’ve just updated it with a new entry

Never Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

Chris Voss was an FBI negotiator and developed his skills and techniques by talking to kidnappers, hostage takers, employers, and car salesmen. I think the techniques in this book - calibrated questions, focusing on the issue, treating the people you’re negotiating with as partners, observing how people act, building trust - are essential to having a successful career as manager, and to ensuring you and your team are set up for success. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Even Xero isn’t immune to layoffs

Breccan McLeod Lundy on the pressure to come up with a snappy mission statement or purpose for his company:

You have the choice between saying something that sounds great but isn’t quite true or saying too much and being asked why you didn’t just stick with “Our purpose is to make the world a better place”.

Companies, like people, have a hierarchy of needs - they need to make a certain amount of money to even be able to think about broader social purpose. I think for us we’d have to do a prioritized list of purposes which doesn’t sound as cool as “purpose” but is necessary to be functional in the long run.

What happens when the US Army needs 36,000 kettlebells, fast

LeadDev: Riding the ever-changing waves of front-end development

Will Larson: Writing an engineering strategy

Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly. If we just had an engineering strategy, their eyes will implore you, things would be okay. For a long time, those imploring eyes haunted me, because I simply didn’t know what to give them: what is an engineering strategy?

One thing about being a manager yourself is that you can tend to forget that you have a manager, and that you need to practice the advice you might give to your own reports. This talk by Katrina Clokie is an excellent reminder of the value of maintaining a good working relationship with yours.

I was lucky enough to work and talk with Katrina for a couple of years and I’m so much the better for it. Katrina has a gift for framing things slightly differently than you’d expect, generally towards more effective outcomes and Making the most of your manager is a great example: it’s not about managing up, it’s about what you can do to make sure you have an effective advocate in the workplace.