More Matt Mullenweg, this time on Design Better and an interesting grab-bag of different topics.

Distributed is back! This episode (mostly) doesn’t have Matt but is interesting and informative. I particularly liked the discussion around the difference between meetups and offsites (the other type I see is what I call “royal tours”), and the discussion around psychological safety.

Will Larson’s post on measuring an engineering organisation, in slide format.

Neat new tool from the people behind rich & textualize, Trogon is an interactive tool for your click tools, making it easier to discover/explore.

Work Chronicles

Good tips for boosting developer productivity.

Comments on uptime targets - the other point I would make here is that for nearly any system, there are multiple pieces that can independently fail without taking the whole thing down, so you actually need to consider a whole bunch of separate uptime targets.

Summary of a Google research paper on flow/focus.

Interesting thoughts on developer surveys: infraeng.dev/developer…

Nice intro to contrafreeloading.

Changing from microservices although with some general “microservices are often the wrong choice” commentary.

Things to consider before committing to a rewrite.

Another “we moved away from microservices” story but also interesting in terms of the monitoring that they are doing. h/t Kostas

Long but good post on planning from an executive level.

I love this post on organisational culture (building on from the classic “choose boring technology”). This bit especially:

The best informal culture is almost always bottoms up. But managers, execs, HR/People teams, etc can encourage informal culture. One of the most powerful things you can do is just participate. Show up for drinks, play the board games, keep the puns rolling, get silly with your team! Your participation gives people permission and shows that you value their creative cultural labor at work.

I love this site on building cli interfaces, not only what it says but it’s so beautifully designed.

It’s also interesting to think about the cli as a conversation in the context of LLM tools that are so hot right now.

This is quite US focused, but an interesting idea. One that is Aotearoa/NZ focused would be pretty cool. github.com/derwiki/l…

Interesting info about “bank Python”. If I understand correctly, a bunch of the newer open banking systems are heavily using Python (regular Python, I think).

Thoughts on critical thinking (and also jargon) - the two other qualities that I have always admired, are the ability to admit when you don’t know something (and will go find it out) and to admit when you were wrong.

Good practical suggestions on building webhook functionality: workos.com/blog/buil…

Presented as PR writing tips, but just generally writing tips, really: www.simplethread.com/writing-t…

Quite technical post in measuring dev happiness and productivity: engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2023…

I agree slack is important, but I’m not sure that using the lower bound for sprints (or “time boxes”) would work well. martinfowler.com/bliki/Sla…

Interesting thoughts on LLMs in production: huyenchip.com/2023/04/1…

Really nice visual intro to load balancing algorithms: samwho.dev/load-bala… (h/t Kostas)