Curated Content September 2023
Articles
The Worst Programmer
An excellent article by Dan North on many of the hazards of measuring software engineers as individuals and using those individual measurements to make performance assessment decisions.
They measure the engine, not the contribution of individual pistons, because that makes no sense.
Much Ado About The OODA Loop
Another interesting article from Cedric Chin on John Boyd and the OODA loop.
The article discusses the loop as it applies to business, exploring both the interesting implications, and the caveats as Boyd wasn't a business practitioner, and actually somewhat controversial/limited as a warfare practitioner.
Section 4 Idea 4: Building Organisations That Can Orient Quickly - stands out to me as one of the more interesting sections. It posits something that I've hypothesized for a while, but not been able to clearly articulate, in that you want members of your team to share significant mental overlap in order to reduce friction and allow folks to quickly build in a unified way.
P-254 - Retrospective
In 254th article in his series on building Asteroids in Python Ron Jefferies summarizes lesson learned and key takeaways. He puts forward a lot of benefits of working in a specific agile style, as well as his own personal takeaways.
Before recommending the entire series, I'd actually start here at the end, and then if the lessons seem compelling and you'd like to see the journey, return to the start and walk as much of the path with him as you'd like.
Books
Unfortunately, this month I don't have any books to recommend as curated content. I wrapped up a few decent fiction and non-fiction books, but none of them were good enough that I'd actively recommend them to others.
Conf Talks
Rather than repeat myself, this month just check out my post highlighting ElixirConf US 2023.
Podcasts
No podcasts this month.