If you only read one thingYour Small Imprecise Ask Is a Big Waste of Their Time (4 minute read) Once a CEO I reported to told me, âStephan be careful with what you say in a meeting, someone might take it as a task and run with it, spending a week on something you were just a little curious about.â The article is about that and beyond. âA manager asks a direct report âcan you do X?â The report spends 10 times the amount of time that was expected to do the task, leaving the manager befuddledâ The article has some good insights, but the article has also some good tips like âClarify the expected time investmentâ. Must read. https://staysaasy.com/startups/2023/11/10/imprecise-asks.html
Stories Iâve enjoyed this weekHitting OKRs vs Doing Your Job (17 minute read) Isnât this the core of the problem? OKRs in software development mean you are doing your job? âIn Engineering, quarterly OKRs can feel like a duplication of product planning. Basically, they say âShip the Roadmap.ââ Something not enough CEOs understand, and torture CTOs - like my clients - to come up with OKRs. Ship the roadmap! A surprisingly deep article on the topic, âWhy are OKRs easier in Marketing? Marketing is closer to project work, while Engineering is product work.â IMHO CTO should come up with OKRs that help them achieve their goals - not someone elseâs goals. You donât have your own goals? Probably because you donât have a tech strategy. And you donât have a tech strategy because you donât have a tech vision. Start there, OKRs are last in line. https://jessitron.com/2025/01/05/hitting-okrs-vs-doing-your-job/ Remarkable! A long list of benchmarks of LLMs, on coding, math etc. invented by people to check if LLMs can do it, that are stopped because the LLMs became too good. The first victims of the new age. https://r0bk.github.io/killedbyllm/ Bonkers Comptime (46 minute read) Comptime is one of the concepts that you need to learn about, even if you donât use it or ever use Zig - where it is most utilized. Comptime is different from macros and other similar concepts, as it is the same language, just executed at compile time. You want to calculate one thing once, do it at comptime. But there is more you can do. This example iterates over the fields of a struct - hey Java can do that! - but itâs not reflection at runtime, itâs done at compile time without the need for Reflection. Genius â¤ď¸
My only fear would be that it does, like Rust macros, increase compile times a lot. https://www.scottredig.com/blog/bonkers_comptime/ Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to âwrite better codeâ? (50 minute read) Well, can they? Kind of. And also not. Fascinating read and deep dive. The article takes a problem and repeatedly asks the LLM to write better code. The LLM sometimes does, regresses other times and makes random changes changing technologies - and it also hallucinates. It does not get better with a system prompt. You really need to know what you are doing, and for knowing you probably need to be a seasoned senior developer. But with (excellent) good prompting, there is some progress with âwrite better code.â https://minimaxir.com/2025/01/write-better-code/ The Evolution of SRE at Google (23 minute read) A very deep trip into how Google SREs work. If you have an operational challenge,
a good read. Do you know what STAMP is? I didnât. https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/evolution-sre-google Conscious unbossing - 52% of Gen-Z professionals donât want to be middle managers (10 minute read) You struggle with getting new middle managers. It takes time to get senior developers into management roles, when you need that middle management (trick: Every senior manages an intern to see if it is for them). Now this study says 72% of Gen-Z professionals donât want to manage other people, with â69% of Gen-Z say middle management is too high stress, low rewardâ. As the IC role will change with AI, so will the management role. Hope for Gen-Z that means they get what they want - though my skeptical developer mind doesnât think so. For you: Even harder to get new middle managers. https://www.robertwalters.co.uk/insights/news/blog/conscious-unbossing.html Join the CTO newsletter! | |