If you only read one thingBuilding trust as a software engineer (9 minute read) Also for CTOs: āWarren Buffet describes reputations as taking 20 years to build, and only a minute to destroy.ā Excellent read, basically what makes you a senior. And because youāre a CTO, the article is about: What to expect from your senior developers and leads āI had been doing the work of two L4 engineers, but that would never get me promoted to an L5. What he needed was someone he could reliably hold accountable to hitting specific project goals. Furthermore, if for some reason a goal couldnāt be hit, he needed me to raise the blocker ASAP along with a new plan.ā https://graphite.dev/blog/trust š¦ Tweet of the week
1 person companies are the next thing, something I strongly believe in. https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/1752753792058294725 š Graph of the week
Too many phones This is usually a sign that you donāt know your market. Same thing if as a startup you throw out more and more features because you donāt know your USP or what you are doing. Today, Samsung copied Apple mostly, then expanded adding the Note, then killing the Note to be more like Apple again, then adding flip phones, then killing those and have the S24. They just donāt know what they are doing, just like Nokia. And if they are confused, how can their customers not be confused? (or your customer) From: TextQuery, https://textquery.app/2024/02/06/nokia-made-too-many-phones/
Stories Iāve enjoyed this weekHow to keep engineers out of meeting hell (6 minute read) My simple productivity metrics:
From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate (11 minute read) A long list worthy to read. Perhaps you feel the same. āAs a leader of a team in an org with performance calibrations, I must nominate 1 person who hasnāt been working hard enough every 6 months. This human chess is soul-suckingā Not sure how a company can work as a team when every 6 months someone is thrown off the plank. What top management does not understand, trust is not a one-way street. As is loyalty. You give loyalty, you get loyalty. And itās not even mostly about the person who you throw overboard, but those still on board. How can they trust you? Take my favorite Tony Soprano quote: āThose who want respect, give respectā https://thoughtspile.github.io/2024/02/16/eng-to-em/ https://morethancoding.com/2024/02/16/how-to-keep-engineers-out-of-meeting-hell/ Discover Best OpenAI Sora Prompts š (5 minute read) ChatGPT, bam! DALL-E, bam! Now video from text prompts. It feels like AI is accelerating and mind-boggling things appear yearly. ChatGPT would have been enough for 10 years, then image diffusion, now video. Bam, bam, bam! (Also, there are always people who jump very early on new trains). HURU - Your Personal AI Job Interview Coach (13 minute read) Know thy enemy! Amazing what people use today. Itās labeled as a interview preparation app, but both you and I know, itās not for preparation. 2x Founder Mistakes (10 minute read) Love reading stuff like this, though I think you can learn more from success than other peoples mistakes. If you see success, you can copy it. If you see mistakes, you can not make them, but it will not take you 1 inch closer to your goal. But reading these is entertaining. And āDo live coding interviews, no matter what.ā https://alexgraveley.com/founder-mistakes.html [Video] Zuckerberg: companies realizing there can be benefits to being leaner (15 minute read) After hire, hire, hire and the more people the better, the next big thing is smaller companies. The one-person-billion-$ company from Sam Altman (see above), a leaner Facebook from Mark Zuckerberg. Are you lean enough? Have you taken advantage of AI and all the modern tools to do more with less? https://youtu.be/xQqsvRHjas4?si=OnDz_bu2NnL1fZRl&t=1474 The Vision Pro is perfectly executed. And Iām sure much better than my Oculus Rift. But it still needs to get much smaller and lighter to replace my 38" Monitor for convenience for coding. But weāll get there. https://willem.com/blog/2024-02-16_vision-pro/ My Sixth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder (18 minute read) This is why startups and large companies plateau. It takes many years to make something new successful. In large companies like eBay, were Iāve worked, if something doesnāt work after a year, it will be stopped. But new products take time. And startups seldom start a new product early enough, and when their main product plateaus, they have no idea what to do next. Seen this with several coachees. https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-6/ Automated Unit Test Improvement using Large Language Models at Meta (4 minute read) Alluring paper, there is huge potential, an AI rewriting existing tests. Whenever I let ChatGTP write some code, I also ask about 5 to 10 tests for it. Sadly, the paper has no code examples, or I couldnāt find them. Is the code still readable? Does it make sense? Or are we in chess land? I watch a lot of online chess coverage, and quite often GM say: āThis is a computer move, no one understandsā when the computer suggests a move. Same here with the tests? https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09171 VMware now on Subscription (14 minute read) VMware moved from selling software licenses to a subscription model. Customers are angry, the press is as bad as it gets, VMware powers through. Just like Adobe. If there is no alternative, what can customers do? They will just pay (see Adobe, though I use Affinity myself). When working for the biggest German real estate website ImmoScout24, we doubled prices. Customers were angry, left, but everyone of them came back. Most startup pricing is too cheap. Low prices indicate you donāt have a strong USP that customers want. Get one. https://news.vmware.com/company/vmware-by-broadcom-business-simplification How to run systemd in a container (17 minute read) Everyone hates Systemd, I love it. I deploy my Go apps with Systemd, itās simple, and itās secure. If you use Docker or Podman, think about running your app inside the container by Systemd. https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/04/24/how-to-run-systemd-in-a-container#enter_podman Let Me Tell You A Secret (7 minute read) āIf you can actively listen, the conversation alone can improve morale.ā https://blog.glyph.im/2024/02/let-me-tell-you-a-secret.html Introducing SafeTest: A Novel Approach to Front End Testing (20 minute read) Sounds very novel and interesting, but Iām too stupid to get it. Send me a reply if youāve got it. But you did hear about it here! https://netflixtechblog.com/introducing-safetest-a-novel-approach-to-front-end-testing-37f9f88c152d Legendary Industry Veterans Get Candid On Ageism In Gaming (12 minute read) Not only in the gaming industry. Try to get a job in a startup as a coder when youāre 40+. Good luck. Ageism is the dark secret of software engineering no one talks about. Except for me for many years. And hopefully you. https://kotaku.com/activision-ageism-video-games-cliffy-b-warren-spector-1851220345 Your code concierge (10 minute read) For years, I thought managing branches is too hard, at least in Jetbrains products (like Goland). Sadly, after decades of EVERYTHING from Apple, Iām a Windows/WSL person and it does not run windows. But it looks terrific to run branches + AI. Join the CTO newsletter! | |
