If you only read one thingWhat Do We Owe Our Teams? (11 minute read) This article is powerful. I ā¤ļø love it. Four very basic but impactful things. Iāve practiced the first one Be Umbrellas, Not Funnels for decades. I do think this was the main reason people respected me as a manager. āCompanies, especially executive teams, can generate a lot of chaos: āsmallā interrupts, sudden shifts, cross-functional blame, budget jousting. In the colorful MBA vernacular, weāre either poop umbrellas or poop funnels: buffering our teams from the noise and confusion as best we can, or letting it all fall on their heads.ā šļø Podcast of the weekCory Doctorow: Platform capitalism and the curse of āenshittificationā (3 minute read) If you donāt want to listen, you can read about āenshittificationā https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys āHere is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.ā š¹ Video of the WeekInterview with Senior JS Developer in 2022 āWell this was a toolchain from last week, this week is different [ā¦] My job is to keep our code running while other packages are changing theirsā Of course this is satire. But it reflects everything that is wrong with Javascript. To the point I have given up on it. The promise that you write the same code in the frontend and backend with the same people never materialized. The benefits of the frontend frameworks never materialized. But millions of hours have been spent on framework migration and keeping npm dependencies working. Perhaps we could have saved the world with those smart people instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk Stories Iāve enjoyed this weekAutomatically migrate code to another language with ChatGPT (13 minute read) This project amazed me. Easily migrate from one stack to another. Then it writes unit tests for you to run it against the new code. Yhe it debugs the code from logs. Programming languages become virtual. Just like you didnāt care about how virtual machines did memory management, you no longer care about the programming language. āEasily migrate your codebase from one framework or language to another. [ā¦] It iteratively debugs the code for for you with context from logs, error messages, relevant files, and directory structure.ā https://github.com/0xpayne/gpt-migrate Stability AI CEO: There Will Be No (Human) Programmers in Five Years (5 minute read) Iām not sure change is as fast as predicted in this article. Iād say there are no programmers in 20 years. But still, most people Iāve met are much too conservative, itās nice to read someone who is more aggressive with the time frame. https://decrypt.co/147191/no-human-programmers-five-years-ai-stability-ceo The Age of AI has begun (8 minute read) Bill Gates was twice impressed with technology: When he saw a UI and when he saw AI. I was also two times impressed: When my first code printed āHello Stephanā and changed the background colors and when I saw AI. Iām still mightily amazed every time I use ChatGpt to write code. " I watched in awe as they asked GPT, their AI model, 60 multiple-choice questions from the AP Bio examāand it got 59 of them right. Then it wrote outstanding answers to six open-ended questions from the exam." https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Age-of-AI-Has-Begun Threads passes 30M sign-ups in less than 24 hours (4 minute read) Everyone is running for threads. And I canāt get an account because Iām in the EU. And I wondered why they didnāt choose a federated implementation like Mastodon, so they would not have legal problems in the EU. This week when I reflected about Twitter and my Mastodon account, it somehow feels like the time for this kind of apps is over, and Threads donāt matter. Who knows? But imagine a startup with 30M users in the first day. (https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/threads-passes-2-million-downloads-in-2-hours/ Boss such a tyrant you need a job quitting agent? It works in Japan (4 minute read) In Japan, you can outsource quitting your job to someone. Some of my coachees feel miserable but do not quit. Perhaps I should offer āQuitting Serviceā as part of my coaching (a conundrumāthe companies pay me for the coaching). What do you think? https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/05/job_quitting_agents/ ronami/meta-typing : š Functions and algorithms implemented purely with TypeScriptās type system (9 minute read) Do you ever wonder if we have gone too far? Like some scientists on the Manhattan project did? If your type system can Quicksort, who is going to understand it? ātype S1 = QuickSort<[6, 9, 7, 1, 0, 4, 3]>; // [0, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9]ā There seems to be this idea that more complex type systems are better. I was on that trip. But they create errors that are hard to understand. They create code that is hard to understand. Although Iād wish Go - my current language of choice because of simplicity and compile times - would have a little more complex type system (I want syntactic sugar for ?u32 and !u32), simpler is better. https://github.com/ronami/meta-typing You can NOT and should NOT stop procrastinating (12 minute read) āWe are such in a hurry to ābeatā procrastination that we donāt realize itās our smart brain at work, asking a great question we need to listen to. Is it actually worth it to do this thing this way and now?ā As someone who has to fight with this all the time, this sounds like relief. Is it? But perhaps embracing procrastination sets you free to do the things that matter. https://dev.to/jmfayard/you-can-not-and-should-not-stop-procrasting-2ooh Illegal Life Pro Tip: Want to ruin your competitors business? (1 minute read) What is your plan B? Did you have this one in your thread model? https://oppositeinvictus.com/illegal-life-pro-tip-want-to-ruin-your-competitors-business Get a Personal Teacher (3 minute read) Ha, as a CTO coach, I say yes. But no really, get one. Or read the article and then get one. āDonāt listen to people telling you that you can learn everything by yourself. I mean, sure, you could. But it takes way longer, and itās easier to quit for a bunch of reasonsā Your company wonāt pay for this? Sad that they donāt want to support your growth. Still think they are great? https://sebastian.bearblog.dev/get-a-personal-teacher/ Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1 (5 minute read) Several takes on this one. First Iām in Europe, think of me, also host here! Second: Too often the internet was down because us-east-1 was down. There is so much talk about how the cloud makes your setup more resilient, but then they only host on us-east-1. āAs soon as you land back in the United States and turn of Airplane mode on your phone everything just starts feelingā¦ snappier? A little more fluid? As much as T-Mobile and Verizon would like to take credit for that I donāt think thereās much more to it than the physical location of the servers and where you are at that moment.ā Join the CTO newsletter! | |
