Curated Content May 2022

A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of May.

Articles

A case study in early-stage startup execution

A case study in early-stage startup execution
Before joining Wave four years ago, I spoke to a former employee about his experience. He said something that has stayed in my memory ever since: “Wave is really good at execution, so by working at Wave, you’ll learn how to execute very well.”Now that I’ve been here a while, I thought it would be g…

Wave has a number of folks that I admire for their technical abilities and leadership philosophies, and this post summarizes a lot of thoughts I have about working in a startup and executing. A worthwhile read that summarizes some key operating attitudes in a startup, and illustrates them with great stories from the ground.

Farewell, Big Data

Andrew Ng: Farewell, Big Data
Google Brain co-founder and Landing AI founder Andrew Ng has become an evangelist for what he calls the data-centric AI movement. “Collecting more data often helps,” he says. “But if you try to collect more data for everything, that can be a very expensive activity.”

Andrew Ng on how we need more organizations to make useful AI available with smaller datasets by explicitly targeting weaknesses in your model's data set and improving it.

Books

Another month where I've been slowly making my way through books, but they've been lower on my list. I'm currently reading Imaginable by Jane McGonigal, and will likely give it a full recommendation, but I want to wrap it up to be able to give a full review.

Conference Talks

This month I didn't have any conference talks to watch in the pipeline, so I'm going to shamelessly plug my talk, Automated Browser Testing for LiveView Using Wallaby:

This talk is on using Wallaby, an Elixir wrapper around Chromedriver and Selenium webdriver, to power browser testing in an easy to use way.

Conference Talks
The conference talks I’ve given over the course of my career. I’m going to continue to add to this list. Automated Browser Testing for Phoenix LiveView Using Wallaby -The Big Elixir 2022 I gave this talk March of 2022 at the Elixir programming language conference The Big Elixir. The conference

Podcasts

Mob programming deep dive with Woody Zuill (The Changelog #488)
We’re talking with Woody Zuill today about all things Mob Programming. Woody leads Mob Programming workshops, he’s a speaker on agile related topics, and coaches and guides orgs interested in creating an environment where people can do their best work. We talk through it all and we even get some ama…

On collaboration on teams and how to think about that with Woody Zuill, with a special emphasis on mob programming, though Woody isn't a hardliner about it.

Tweets

A great thread from Charity Majors on the fact that you're making a tradeoff between testing before production and in production. Obviously in safety critical applications you want to optimize for testing earlier and rigorously, but you also want to do what you can to reduce the risk of testing in production as much as possible, because sometimes the trade to create that environment for a line of business application can be too high.