If you only read one thing📅 Calendar. Not to-do lists. (11 minute read) If it’s not in your calendar, it might not happen. I agree Make every task you would like to do — including meetings, “to-do’s”, doing nothing, watching Game of Thrones — a calendar entry. It also helps you later understand what you have worked on and how you have spent time. And then delegate things and don’t do things that are not worth that you do them. https://deviparikh.medium.com/calendar-in-stead-of-to-do-lists-9ada86a512dd Comic of the week
Talking about productivity? Just let coders write code. Also: Home office. Source:CommitStrip (they seem to have an HTTPS problem, so no link) Stories I’ve enjoyed this week🧑🚀 Valueless CTO: High Salary, No Return (18 minute read) Interesting classification:
I often meet the misaligned CTOs, and I might add the “Non-manager CTO” who lacks basic management skills (again buy my book https://ctobook.dev - It helps you more than the book sale helps me, let me assure you that ;-) Work on it, don’t get fired. https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/cto-value-high-salary-no-return/ The Worst Outcome is a Mediocre Success (9 minute read) Had this with LinkedIn Ads for my book ( https://ctobook.dev ). Tried images and videos. The Results are inconclusive. What to do now? With a raging success, the action would be clear (more ads!). Without any sales, action would be clear too (stop it!). In the middle? Not sure. *This is also why I advise everyone to only have two project stati: red and green. Clear what to do: Green means nothing to do, Red means action. With yellow and orange, what do you do? https://pivotal.substack.com/p/the-worst-outcome-is-a-mediocre-success 🤖 BP Earnings Call: ‘We need 70% less coders from third parties to code as the AI handles most of the coding.’ (3 minute read) Here we go, BP says *“We need 70% less coders from third parties to code as the AI handles most of the coding, the human only needs to look at the final 30% to validate it, that’s a big savings for the company moving forward.” When I tell people this happens and will happen, I’m scoffed at (I look at you Hackernews!). What are you doing about AI? Have you changed your hiring plans, if not, why?! https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1cmi5gj/bp_earnings_call_we_need_70_less_coders_from/ A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian (12 minute read) Google deleted everything from a customer (UniSuper). What I tell CTOs I meet, if you have backups only with the cloud provider who runs your systems, YOU DON’T HAVE BACKUPS AT ALL. You will be glad I shouted when it hits you. “UniSuper had backups in place with an additional service provider. These backups have minimised data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration.” Puh! Do you? 160.000 downloads a week for that uses this Either these are all geniuses of DRY and buy-dont-build, or these are the 50% developers that I have to sort out in interviews because they can’t code. You decide. https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even 🎯 Strategy as a Series of Beliefs (16 minute read) Still amazed that people disagree what strategy is, and no one seems to know (but this article is good!). And most CTOs I know have no tech strategy, and companies have no business strategy. When I ask, they tell me “Oh, yes, hmm, there is a PowerPoint slide somewhere” - If you can’t tell me in one sentence, and if everyone in the company doesn’t give the same answer, you don’t have a strategy. And all want to become a 🦄. A vision is a self-evident golden place in the future. A strategy is your plan to get there, what route to choose from the myriad of possibilities and how you overcome obstacles of that way. Everyone needs to know these two by heart. https://kellblog.com/2024/05/12/strategy-as-a-series-of-beliefs/ Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds (10 minute read) Paywall. But I’m sure the URL is archived somewhere. Or you read the source study (PDF) https://harris.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/wright-return-to-office.pdf The core is “Return-to-office mandates at some of the most powerful tech companies — Apple, Microsoft and SpaceX — were followed by a spike in departures among the most senior, tough-to-replace talent” Giving a lollipop to a child is easy, taking it away ends always in drama. Not that senior talents are children, that was not my point. People want freedom, to go to the office if they want that day (to talk, socialize and get away from home), and stay at home when they feel like it. Taking this away will make people leave. “D’oh”* as a great philosopher said once. On top of that, managers will not want to manage RTO and try to keep their top talent on board and have ongoing discussions about RTO with a constant need to sugarcoat it;they might just leave the company for a job where they don’t need to get into RTO discussions. I would. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/05/12/rto-microsoft-apple-spacex/ GPT-4o’s Memory Breakthrough! (NIAN code) (2 minute read) Interesting benchmark. Feeding the LLM a prompt with 2500 limericks. Then asking about one of the limericks. Looks like GPT-4o declasses all other LLMs on this, with a large memory window. It can answer questions often 100% of the time, depending on the position of the information in the prompt. Other LLMs go down to 20%. There are so many things on LLM performance we don’t know yet. The Notifier Pattern for Applications That Use Postgres (11 minute read) Postgres for everything. I encourage every CTO to reduce their tech zoo as much as possible, perhaps using Postgres for everything if possible. Many features of Postgres are not utilized enough. e.g. Notifications with Listen/Notify. Together with pg_cron you can let your app do things on time, without you needing a job server, which is often a SPOF and a pain to manage and run, it sticks out like a sore thumb (in 3 of my/the startups I’ve worked for as CTO). Look into Postgres Listen/Notify if you use Postgres. Claude is now available in Europe (15 minute read) You think there is a globalized world, and then I have to learn that Claude is only now available in Europe “We’re excited to announce that Claude, Anthropic’s trusted AI assistant, is now available for people and businesses across Europe to enhance their productivity and creativity.” This might be a reason to use it, “Claude has strong levels of comprehension and fluency in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and other European languages,” I often feel ChatGPT is week on this one. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-europe Report Says Gen Z’s AI Work Chops Could Displace Millennials (6 minute read) Gen-Z knows AI the report says, Millenials don’t, so they get replaced. Lucky I’m Gen-X, so I’m replaced already. (If you’re Gen-X and haven’t read Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland, stop reading and go buy it). https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/report-shows-gen-zs-ai-work-ai-chops-could-displace-millennials.html Dell API abused to steal 49 million customer records in data breach (9 minute read) What API do you have that 3rd parties you “trust” can get all your data? At least limit information you return in queries >10 results, and rate limit point queries for individual records. You do? Excellent. Nearly no one I know does this, developers - ha GraphQL - let you query as much and in as much detail as you want. Laws of Software Evolution (7 minute read) I’m always looking behind the drivers of things, I found this idea interesting “Software exists to support a real-world task, and as the real world changes, the software must change with it or become increasingly less relevant.” as we sometimes try to build a product for “a market” or “an target customer”, when the customer moves while we develop things. For example, with the shift to using LLM prompts, or away from using Google search. I feel CEOs think too much about “building that software” as it is a static thing. https://two-wrongs.com/laws-of-software-evolution My book is available now❤️ #1 bestseller on Leanpub ❤️
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