The problem with the “fire fast” part of Fire Fast, but Hire Better is that you’re firing people. Hiring then firing someone is incredibly harmful to the fired, even when it’s ultimately best for both sides. Keeping people that don’t belong is bad too, so hiring better is where the focus must be.

Zuckerberg: “We’re just not going to pay for content when it’s not valuable to people. … when push comes to shove, if they demanded that we don’t use their content, then we just wouldn’t use their content. It’s not like that’s going to change the outcome of this stuff that much.”

In other words: we’re going to steal from so many people that if a few complain, who cares?

Using Git revert to ‘hide’ cherry-picked commits - this seems nicer than rebasing in some cases.

Interesting Google extends BIMI to work with CMC as well as VMC - I did not know about CMCs before. Assuming there’s still a reasonable verification process in place - and ideally that a CMC is cheaper than a VMC - this seems a good move.

(I’m still meh on BIMI in general).

Via Spam Resource

Interesting read on the history of git.

Being wary about DRY - the other place people DRY too quickly is tests.

“Your product team can see that Feature A is 250 tasks, Feature B is 50 tasks and that your team completes tasks at an average rate of 40 tasks per week to project a reasonable completion time on their own. Feature A would probably take a little over 6 weeks. Feature B would probably take a little over 1 week.

You get more accurate projections and estimates because you stopped estimating”

You didn’t stop estimating. You moved the estimating to another team.

The rest of the post is a good summary of how story points fail and how to improve on that but at the end of the day, people will still want dates (and maybe now also a change request process)l

Good basic post on dogfooding. I also believe this is critical and something that has been trickier personally in the last couple of years.

“We are sleepwalking into a terrible situation where a few parties have almost complete control over our entire energy supply, while these parties don’t fall under any energy law. We regulate them as if they were a normal website, which means we hardly regulate them at all.” Bert Hubert

Advanced Testing with Go slides and video: quite a lot of good content not specific to Go. (via Ben Hoyt)

TIL the name “Protege effect”, but I’ve definitely seen and experienced this too. Mentioned in this list of reasons why hiring juniors is important.

Good suggestions for evaluating dependencies - I would look at project activity before the code, though, just because it’s much easier.

I also look up the project on snyk (socket is also ok, but I find snyk more insightful), and do some searching around CVEs and security.

Recommendations from people or organisations or projects I trust have an impact, too.

Interesting thoughts on accidental vs. deliberate spending in the context often of open-source funding. The linked splitting the check idea is interesting in too, although these really need big players to get on board to get anywhere.

Long but good read on Agile, Scrum, Jira, and the like (but with more cussing than it needs).

Scathing take on the viability of a Mars colony.

In a reflection of the last 20 years Matt Gemmell has 5 lessons learnt:

There’s no substitute for just doing the work, day after day, year after year. The best strategy is almost always to avoid conflict. Quitting the news enhances happiness. Mental health is a very real thing, and you never completely heal from abuse. Becoming a parent changes everything.

These all resonate with me very strongly.

Interesting thoughts on automated dependency updates - I’ve come across this in work situations too. At the moment we’re also going for a quite minimal approach focused around when we do releases.

I love this accident forgiveness policy from fly.io. I think this really is one of the most terrifying aspects of using elastic cloud services.

Wonderfully pointless network transmission via a profile field.

“the dream of every Aucklander being only a short walk away from a bus on a 15-minute schedule” - people who write things like this seemingly have no idea what kind of places Auckland encompasses, and it’s always super annoying to read.

A bunch of new features from Apple focused on the death of a loved one would be really great. There would be plenty of heartstring-tugging opportunities for marketing, too.

Good talk by Gylph on “the perfect Python project” - the important bit is about 2/3rds through, after the song.

Delightful (with explicit language) screed against the current business obsession with genAI.

Ben Brooks in his latest journal (membership required and recommended):

“Why are we still doing signatures? It seems really antiquated when you realize you could sign with biometrics [and] I could not tell you if it was my signature or not on most documents because …I am pretty sure I have three signatures now. I have my ‘wet ink’ signature that I can sign with a pen. I have my left-handed fingertip signature than I do on most digital documents when asked. And lastly I have my […]scribble that I have come to do when shit is more annoying than anything else. None of them look remotely the same.”

So true (both points).

I’m no expert on TV viewing metrics, but this:

“Figures provided by TVNZ show the premiere episode of NZ’s Best Homes with Phil Spencer had an average audience of 490,000 – almost half a million people. Notably, that was more than the 473,900 who tuned into the final episode of Sunday last month” (This Spinoff)

sounds to me like the people who are watching linear TV on a Sunday night don’t care what’s on, they’re just watching at that time.

It also boggles my mind that about a tenth of NZ are still watching linear TV.