Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 122.4

by Stephan Schmidt

Happy 🌞 Sunday,

Welcome to my opinionated newsletter. This week’s insights

• 🎯 Focus is a superpower - and essential for CTOs
• 💰 LLM costs rising while token costs are falling
• 💊 When simple advice meets messy reality
• 📋 Best advice from 7 years at PagerDuty
• 🔒 GDPR in Rust types
• 💬 New ideas for remote teams: RAMBLE!
• 🦆 Your new default choice: #DuckLake
• 💻 AI might take away what developers love about coding
• 🏳️‍🌈 Bump when you’re proud of the release #PrideVersioning
• ⚙️ Friction - 50,000 years of removing barriers
• 🕸️ How to make websites that require lots of time - Things to avoid or enjoy

Good reading, have a nice Sunday ❤️ and a great week,

Stephan
CTO-Coach

If you only read one thing

Attention is your scarcest resource (7 minute read)

“Management Attempt #1 didn’t go very well; being distracted by programming, I made lots of embarrassing mistakes that made my reports’ lives harder” - I can relate to that, as can surely many of you. The best boss I ever had said, “Stephan, a manager has always more things than they can handle, you need to learn to deal with it.” It’s very easy to get distracted as a manager. There are many things going on. It’s like walking through Akihabara. Focus is a superpower. Focus, focus, focus on the one thing - or in the frame of the article: put your attention into one thing. I have a sign haging behind me “One thing a day” - this mantra makes sure I do significant things and do not distracted by the many things going on - and also makes me happy, because each evening I have one thing I have achieved. “50%+ focus” is roughly when something becomes the top idea in your mind. [..] Most importantly, you can only be 50%+-focused on one thing at a time"

The author learned some tricks to stay focused as a manager, “Care viscerally”, “Monotask” (YES: “I was blocked on waiting for a tech partner to give me API documentation—I’d let myself stay stuck instead of sliding off to work on something else.” - it’s so much better when developers twiddle their thumbs instead of working on the second most important thing. No, really!), “Evade obligations” - be careful with commitments and promises. Too many will bind you and bring you down, and “Timebox bullshit”. For CTOs - and foudners - I might add, the number one thing to stay focused is have a vision. A great vision is about impact, not about you. A tech vision helps you stay focused, and on top helps everyone else in tech stay focused. For every decision you can ask: Does it progress us towards the vision? Yes -> Do. No -> Don’t do it. And the article - worth a read.

https://www.benkuhn.net/attention/

Stories I’ve enjoyed this week

tokens are getting more expensive (12 minute read)

Many important insights into AIs and LLM business models with “you’ve seen the a16z chart showing llm costs dropping 10x every year.” but “gpt-3.5 is 10x cheaper than it was. it’s also as desirable as a flip phone at an iphone launch.” With many diagrams!

https://ethanding.substack.com/p/ai-subscriptions-get-short-squeezed

The pill of perspective (15 minute read)

This is about product, but you can easily replace product manager with CTO here. “They dream of better, but they’re stuck comparing their messy reality to oversimplified advice and polished case studies that only show the winning side of a story. Each time, they read: ‘You just need to do X, and everything will be fine.’” but "[..] over time, they often leave behind frustration and disappointment for many people out there. [..] Not because the advice is wrong, but because it’s incomplete." We’ve seen this with Scrum, and Lean, and the famous Spotify tribes, and chaos engineering and two-pizza teams and microservices and “move fast and break things” and “fail fast” and “just ship it” and DevOps and continuous deployment and the mythical 10x engineer and agile estimations with velocity and on and on and on. One hand holds the simple advice, the other holds the messy reality and CTOs wonder how to combine these two. Don’t cargo cult, do the things you understand and you understand the drivers, reasons and why. To find out about the blue and red pill, you need to read the article.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-168625890

The Best Advice I Got at PagerDuty (4 minute read)

Excellent points

• “Yup, it’s tough.”
• “Sometimes it’s you.”
• “Keep track of your bank accounts.”
• “Time to first referral.”
• “Slow down. Simplify. Repeat. Repeat again.”
• “Show me.”
• “Be coachable.” You might nod on all of those, but it would be a disservice to not read the article. I could have come up with all of them - not to brag, but to validate their importance. As a coach I love “Be coachable.” especially because from time to time I come across coaching clients who are in deep trouble but uncoachable. And if I’m the last ressort, and they are uncoachable, what then?

https://euri.ca/blog/2025-7-tips-from-7-years-at-pagerduty/

Practical Static Analysis for Privacy Bugs (4 minute read)

How do you know your legal texts and obligations around privacy are met in your code? These researches have encoded this in Rusts type system e.g.

#[paralegal::marker(user_data)]
..
Somewhere:
1. For each "user data" type marked user_data:
A. There is a "source" that produces "user data" where:
  a. There is a "deleter" marked deletes where:
    i) "source" goes to "deleter"

Compile time correctness of GDPR rules?

https://blog.brownplt.org/2025/08/03/paralegal.html

If you’re remote, ramble (2 minute read)

I ❤️ when people come up with new ideas to make remote working nicer. “A tip for remote teams of 2-10 people. Create a personal “ramblings” channel for each teammate in your team’s chat app of choice.”

https://stephango.com/ramblings

DuckLake is an integrated data lake and catalog format (3 minute read)

DuckDb is undervalued, and also my current suggestion for your data lake when your data is in S3. DuckLake makes that easier. Should be your default choice together with Postgres if you can’t afford BigQuery.

https://ducklake.select/

Why I Do Programming (4 minute read)

AI is changing programming. And again it depends on why developers are developers. Someone with this view on programming, “For me, programming has always been more than a skill. It’s a way to explore, to tinker, and to satisfy curiosity.” will probably be fine with AI. Someone who is in development to solve code puzzles, the best way to arrange code to make it beautiful, will have a hard time. This is the same as with reorgs in startups. Or process changes. Or culture changes. People are in your company (department) because they like the way it is. If you change a lot, people will leave because it’s no longer the way when they joined. Same with coding and AI. We probably will see very different people in software development in the future.

https://esafev.com/notes/why-i-do-programming/

Pride Versioning - Pride Versioning 🏳️‍🌈 0.3.0 (1 minute read)

I found that one funny, “Proud version / first Segment - Bump when you are proud of the release.” And it’s simple. And developers should be more proud of what they code.

https://pridever.org/

Friction and not being touched (8 minute read)

If you have read some of my newsletters, I disagree with many things the author writes about AI - talking of doomsayers and apologists. But the author is right about friction - removing friction is the one force that shaped 50.000 years of human technological progress. You can see product managers as a way to remove friction, they are easier to deal with than developers. Im that sense AI removes a lot of friction. For the author this is a bad thing, no friction meaning not being touched. I’m not sure, I don’t know. But looking at 50.000 years of progress, the move to less friction can’t be stopped.

https://tante.cc/2025/07/30/friction-and-not-being-touched/

How to Make Websites That Will Require Lots of Your Time and Energy (3 minute read)

First this might be things to avoid.

1. Install Stuff Indiscriminately From npm
2. Pick a Framework Before You Know You Need One
3. Always, Always Require a Compilation Step Second, perhaps these are things to create a mess because you enjoy untangling technical debt. One of my clients lived in chaos and could not get rid of fire fighting. After some time I’ve said, “You’re firefighting all the time, because you love it” Perhaps the same reason is at work with websites that require lots of time. Developers love it.

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/how-to-make-websites-that-require-lots-of-time-and-energy/

Events For Engineering Managers

• September 18-19, TechLeadConf, Remote
• November 28, TechLeadConf, London