Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 23.1

by Stephan Schmidt

Happyc Friday,

This week’s insights include

• Programming languages have no big impact on 🐛 bug rates
• How all image generation will be replaced by 🤖 AI
• Impact of context switching on productivity

Good reading, nice weekend ❤️ and until next week,

Stephan

Picture of the week

In a study (“On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality”) I found this image, depicting the percentage of bug fixing commits over project time. I found it interesting how some go up and some go down. Comparing the relative levels (0.4% or 0.8%) is also interesting. What I take away from the whole paper, no programming language shows clearly that its features prevent bugs - including those languages that tout fewer bugs as a result of their features.

Stories I’ve encountered last week

The productivity tax you pay for context switching

Again. Developers should not context switch. They should work for as long as possible on their code on one thing. Cluster all meetings that are necessary and prevent all other meetings. Have a Slack and Email Etiquette, and encourage everyone to not read Slack except in the morning, after lunch, and before they leave the office. Block all inbound external communication to the development team - but have more outbound communication (developers should ask instead of trying to figure out things on their own). CTOs seem to understand the tax of context switching but don’t act. The CEOs don’t understand because their job is context switching.

https://async.twist.com/context-switching/

I spent $15 in DALL·E 2 credits creating this AI image and here’s what I learned

AI is here. I haven’t been that amazed with technologies since I wrote my first POKE on a VIC20 to change the color or see the speed of an Acorn Archimedes. I’m blown away by the images created by the AI. Just add “looks like a studio Ghibli image, and it does. It’s happening, AI is beyond the tipping point and the results of image generation are amazing. If you do not have a person in your department thinking 100% of her time about how to apply AI to your business model, you’re too late already, speed up!

https://pub.towardsai.net/i-spent-15-in-dall-e-2-credits-creating-this-ai-image-and-heres-what-i-learned-52f352912025

And another one “I replaced all our blog thumbnails using DALL·E 2 for $45: here’s what I learned”:

https://deephaven.io/blog/2022/08/08/AI-generated-blog-thumbnails/

How to present to executives.

This one is for engineers, but I so often see CTOs struggle to present to other executives and get what they want. So this is important for you too. For more success and that you get the things you need for your job.

https://lethain.com/present-to-executives/

Why your daily stand-ups don’t work and how to fix them

I’m a huge fan of daily standups. In the startup of my wife, everyone did them (marketing, sales, everyone). When I’m in a hiring crisis, my to-go method is to have 5-min daily hiring standups with everyone involved in hiring, which works miracles. And standups create a constant pressure to deliver, something startups, that are always on the brink of failure, need. But I do agree that most standups are done wrong. Some ideas to make them better. Focus on alignment, not status.

https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/08/07/how-to-improve-daily-standups.html

Redis Explained

Do you need to know how Redis works as a CTO? No. Recently I discussed development performance with a coachee - a topic that often arises. There are open source projects with good documentation, bad documentation, and company projects with no documentation. From my coder’s perspective, the difference between an easy and a hard library is the quality of documentation. But still, internal documentation is very bad and makes understanding internal APIs, code, and use cases often very difficult. Work on better (not the wrong one!) documentation for more performance of your dev teams.

https://architecturenotes.co/redis/

To Become Wise, Do Less! The next time the CEO busts you because developers are playing ⚽ table soccer, cite this article. Typing is not the problem of productivity, creativity is the name of the game to have an impact on a company. One of the challenges of the CTO is that people outside development don’t see it as a creative activity, but think productivity comes from typing faster. https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/to-become-wise-do-less