If you only read one thing
Why you need a macro architecture and what did I put in it? (10 minute read) Architecture is so difficult. Either CTOs donât give guidance, or they give too much guidance. Either there are no architects and planned architecture, or they are micromanaging developers. The way out is a macro architecture. Enough guidance to make systems work, not too much guidance for developers to lose ownership and responsibility. https://owehrens.com/why-you-need-a-macro-architecture/ Tweet of the weekDonât add hacks to your code. They will stay. Insist on craftmanship and great features. Piece of evidence:
See https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1772042158046146792 Your inner nerd
OTCA metapixel (99 minute read) This is the most amazing tech thing Iâve encountered the last weeks. You might know the âGame of Lifeâ where the life of pixels depends on their neighbours. I wrote a Game of Life simulator in the 80s as a kid and watched patterns for hours. The Game of Life brings up patterns and blinking things and gliders that move across the matrix. The OTCA metapixel is a very complex game of life pattern, consisting of thousands of pixels, which acts just like one pixel, a meta pixel. It sends a train of spaceships around itself to detect the number of neighbouring pixels and then changes state depending on the number of alive neighbours. This is so amazing. And you can build an OCTA metapixel out of OCTA metapixels, and you have a meta-meta pixel. You can see the metapixel running here: https://oimo.io/works/life/. You can spot the train of spaceships running around the metapixel (clockwise). More explanations here https://blog.amandaghassaei.com/2020/05/01/the-recursive-universe/ This was for your inner nerd. https://conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel
Stories Iâve enjoyed this weekReturn-to-Office Mandates: How to Lose Your Best Performers (13 minute read) The Doom Loop: Reduced Performance â Monitoring by Employer â Loss of Trust â Perform to Metrics â Reduced Performance. The Boom Loop: Engaged Employees â Focus on Outcomes â Flexibility â Increased Trust â Engaged Employees. Go for the Boom Loop. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/return-to-office-mandates-how-to-lose-your-best-performers/ Brilliant Jerks in Engineering (27 minute read) You might be tempted to hire brilliant jerks. On rare occasions (very rare!) this makes sense. Mostly, donât. Theyâll disrupt the teams, make everyone miserable, leave broken code when they lose interest and can lead to rebellions amongst developers (Once a developer told me, âI will not work with that person anymoreââouch). Read âThe problems caused by brilliant jerksâ and âDealing with brilliant jerksâ. And when to hire one. https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-13/brilliant-jerks.html The Innovation/Execution Spectrum (9 minute read) On the distinction between the âinnovation challengeâ and the âexecution challengeâ in startups. Many startups I have seen, think they have an innovation challenge but have an execution challenge â youâre not doing rocket science! âInnovation challenges are rare. Most startups want to believe â or want their investors to believe â that theyâre tackling these kinds of problems, but donât believe the bullshit.â This misunderstanding often leads to the wrong decisions, sometimes for the systems chosen by the CTO. (It doesnât mean you should not innovate, do it, push it!) What sometimes bothers me, is when a CEO tells people they are a tech company with innovative products, then 10 out of 80 people are developers. Youâre not a tech company, obviously. Probably a marketing machine. https://jacobian.org/2020/feb/18/innovation-execution/ The best engineering interview question Iâve ever gotten, Part 1 (5 minute read) Changing code during an interview. In this case for https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2022/01/06/memcached-interview/ Design is an Island (10 minute read) Kent Beck, one of the forgotten masters. A deep exploration of system design as an island. Interesting to read, not sure if the metaphor is stretched too much, but it is an interesting perspective. Given that many companies have self-emerging, chaotic system designs, every guidance is good in my book. https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/design-is-an-island They Praised AI at SXSWâand the Audience Started Booing (8 minute read) âAh, but the audience booed the loudest at this statement: âI actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.ââ Someone didnât read the audience well, I guess. Is this the first backlash? Not that it matters, AI drives down costs so much, that nothing can stop it. But, for starters, people are booing (and others are destroying self-driving Waymo cars). This will get much uglier. And everyone is unprepared. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/they-praised-ai-at-sxswand-the-audience Scripts should be written using the project main language (5 minute read) On one hand, I rewrite my Python scripts into Go, because I know Go and because it Go easier to execute, without libs and virtual environments. It might be easier if everything is in one language. Once in a large company, one small part was written in Ruby. The one Ruby developer out of dozens of developers leaves the company and the code has a bug. Me and another manager then tried to fix the code! On the other hand, some of the arguments go (ha!) away when you use ChatGPT to update and change the scriptsâyou donât need to know Python then. The scripts for this newsletter are mostly written by ChatGPT. https://joaomagfreitas.link/scripts-should-be-written-using-the-project-main-language/ Bayer aims to sustainably improve performance with new organization (8 minute read) Company is in a difficult situation, so we reorg. âNew operating model aims to reduce hierarchies, eliminate bureaucracy and accelerate decision-making processesâ But of course this will not work. There are no magic wonders. Too often I see this with CTOs, âif we do this, everything will changeâ, or CEOs, âif we release this feature, everything will changeâ. No, it wonât, and the reorg will not bring the benefits Bayer hopes for. Or needs. Transitioning Discordâs Engineering Team to Cloud Development Environments (12 minute read) I wonder if this is the future. Moving development to the cloud. More powerful compiler systems than your desktop. Logging in from wherever you are with whatever device you have. Faster onboarding of new developers. Easier interviewing. A friend of mine has been doing this for years. Is this for you? But I struggle with the concept, as I see downsides. Perhaps I need to run https://www.octobench.com to see Go compilation speeds in the cloud. https://www.infoq.com/news/2024/03/discord-cloud-development-env/ Nvidia: Why write code when you can string together a couple chat bots? (9 minute read) As Iâve said, there will be no more developers or software at all. The future is more like Star Trek with one software âWe can get a report every single day, or you know, top of the hour that has something to do with a build plan, or some forecast, or some customer alert, or some bugs database or whatever it happens to beâ A big data lake and an LLM that answers questions, send emails, by itself or on command. âWhat should we do to increase revenue?â âUpsell to our best customers.â âMake it so!â No code written. https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/19/nvidia_why_write_code_when/ The âReitoff principleâ: Why you should add ânothingâ to your work-life schedule (12 minute read) âThe Reitoff principle gives us permission to âwrite offâ a day and intentionally step away from achieving anything.â I stepped away from writing my book ( https://ctobook.dev ) and it felt great! Add nothing to your schedule works. And the world does not stop if you do. Too often CTOs think the world stops if they donât hand hold everyone and everything all the time. It doesnât (and if it does, you havenât delegated enough). This most often comes to light, when CTOs want to go on a two-week vacation for the first time. Dead air on the incident call (9 minute read) Prepare for incidents. Itâs much easier to go into an incident prepared than unprepared (I know!) An interesting piece about silence in incidents âSilence can mean different things to different people in different situations. In this post, Iâll present a few incident scenarios and explore the role of the incident commander in breaking (or simply abiding in) dead air.â https://blog.danslimmon.com/2024/03/18/dead-air-on-the-incident-call/ You can stay remote but you wonât get promoted, Dell warns employees (5 minute read) This is the future lever of many companies for RTO (return to office) policies. You work remotely now, but if you donât come back, youâll not get promoted. And salaries. A company Iâve worked for used salaries and promotions every year to get employees to sign new contracts. You donât sign the contract, you donât get more money. Now RTO. Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity (31 minute read) A long long text. With âThe macro point that you started with is: programming isnât just thinking; itâs thinking plus tactical activities like editing code.â to challenge the notion, that it is irrelevant to optimize some things, in this case typing. Though I donât know, writing these lines, that I could write faster, because it is limited by my thinking. But who knows?! https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/ Is it Time to go Back to the Monolith? (12 minute read) No. But if you start, and you have only a few developers, go with a Monolith. Make it modular, each module responsible for something, like checkout, containing all database code and web UI code. Modules communicate with a message bus. A âModulith.â This way you get the easy setup, debug, deployment benefits of a monolith with some benefits of microservices, like developers not getting in each otherâs way. More details in the article. https://debugagent.com/is-it-time-to-go-back-to-the-monolith Join the CTO newsletter! | |
