If you only read one thingWhy Retention Is So Hard for New Tech Products (5 minute read) Must read. âYou canât fix bad retention. No, adding more notifications will not fix your retention curve. You canât A/B test your way to good retentionâ I know many of you only consider technology your domain, but you need to co-own product. Take a stand for products and features that work, donât let people build things with engineers - youâre responsible for - that donât work. The post has many more great insights, âCrazy viral growth with shitty retention fails. Weâve run this experiment many many times already, across multiple platforms and categoriesâ If there is one thing I want to shout at founders every time, You canât fix missing PMF with marketing! Work hard on PMF, and if you think you have it, Iâd bet you donât, work harder - hint,hint: retention. https://x.com/andrewchen/status/1965419750525431873
Stories Iâve enjoyed this weekWhy do software developers love complexity? (4 minute read) Why do developers love complexity? There are many reasons, this is one of them. âComplexity also signals effort, expertise, and exclusivity. If you struggle to understand it, your brain rewards you with aweâ Great article to understand what drives developers to love complexity - and creates problems to you, the manager. âComplexity shouts, âLook at me!â, while simplicity whispers âDid you notice?â.â IMHO the main driver is, developers are bored by the features they need to implement. Those writing a distributed real time syncing database donât add a myriad of frameworks on top. Those bored by adding the third blue button to the application after rewritinge the same two forms - again! add as many interesting frameworks as they can to not be bored out. https://kyrylo.org/software/2025/08/21/why-do-software-developers-love-complexity.html Magical systems thinking - Works in Progress Magazine (18 minute read) I see many CTOs struggle with transformations and reorganizations. Or with the simple thing of introducing a process into a system. Then I came across this article: âLe Chatelierâs Principle, the idea that the system always kicks backâ and âLe Chatelierâs Principle provided an answer: systems should not be thought of as benign entities that will faithfully carry out their creatorsâ intentions. Rather, over time, they come to oppose their own proper functioning.â Iâve experienced this again and again. Systems are not clockwork. Not your complex deployments and not your product development organization. But there is much more in the article to help you understand. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/magical-systems-thinking/ Why AI Coding is not working? According to the author, itâs because âThe best model of a programming AI is a compiler.â Iâve been saying this for a long time now, one-shotting MVPs and prototypes is the best way for agentic coding (Augmented coding is different). But where I see this as a good thing (excellent thing!), the author thinks this is bad. The fallacy is right there âWhile noobs and managers are excited that the input language to this compiler is English, English is a poor language choice for many reasons.â (Not sure if Iâm the noob or the manager :-) If English is bad, how can a ticket describe what to build? Perhaps itâs not English, but you. https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2025/09/12/ai-coding.html My Quarterly System Health Check-in: Beyond The Dashboard (10 minute read) Many, many, many, many good questions to ask in a quarterly review of your organization, e.g.
https://blog.nilenso.com/blog/2025/09/05/my-quarterly-system-health-check-in-beyond-the-dashboard/ Qwen Ecosystem Expands Rapidly, Accelerating AI Adoption Across Industries (27 minute read) Several people I know use Qwen coder for local AI. I think the battle is not fought out of cloud vs. local AI (currently cloud seems much better), but Qwen is a serious contender for local AI for developers (Looking forward to Apple releasing a M5 studio for local AI, the 395+ seems to be limited by memory bandwidth, which looks to be much more important for AI than for gaming). âQwen3 Launched Models Optimized for Appleâs machine learning framework NVIDIA, AMD, Arm and MediaTek integrate Qwen3, unlocking enhanced AI performance across platformsâ https://www.alizila.com/qwen-ecosystem-expands-rapidly-accelerating-ai-adoption-across-industries/ Why language models hallucinate (12 minute read) Important read - I see too many people getting hallucinations wrong. âHallucinations are plausible but false statements generated by language models. [..] If you do not know the answer but take a wild guess, you might get lucky and be right. Leaving it blank guarantees a zero.â and âNonetheless, accuracy-only scoreboards dominate leaderboards and model cards, motivating developers to build models that guess rather than hold back.â Hallucinations are the most probable filling of gaps in reality. Not right, but highly plausible. https://openai.com/index/why-language-models-hallucinate/ Ex-Google exec: The idea that AI will create new jobs is â100% crapââeven CEOs are at risk of displacement (4 minute read) I always get lots of flak when I say this, but no one yet could convince me (try and reply!) otherwise where the jobs come from when the majority of knowledge workers are laid off. Or perhaps nothing happens, because people silently just have more meetings to waste the time gained by AI. pasika26/backupguardian: Validate database backup files before migration to prevent costly failures (3 minute read) Number one mistake CTOs make when implementing a backup strategy: Not testing backups. I have seen several CTOs who found out their backup was corrupted when they wanted to restore it. Minor: They also donât know how long it takes to restore it, so if something happens, what are you going to tell the CEO how long restoring the database will take? Test restoring your database periodically (start now, no now, right now, on a Sunday? Yes!). And check that your backups are ok. A client of mine recently had to restore a database from backup on a Sunday, but not by their free will. https://github.com/pasika26/backupguardian Upcoming Events For Engineering Managers
What is happening with Stephan?I struck luck this week, with a post on LinkedIn that generated ~80,000 impressions. The driver seems to be reposts, itâs great if you can trigger them. Because people donât talk enough about numbers, also: those impressions drove around 150 new followers. Sad news: We also made the decision to shut down Inkmi :-( On the bright side, there is a huge demand for my AI workshop, CTOs have trouble convincing and motivating their developers to use AI (because, what is in there for developers? - therefor, the workshop).
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