Curated Content September 2023

Articles

The Worst Programmer

https://dannorth.net/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

Much Ado About The OODA Loop
An in-depth look at John Boyd and the OODA loop, the strategic thinker most concerned about fast adaptation under uncertainty.

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.

Microposts

Screenshot of the linked post below.
Jon Reid (@qcoding@iosdev.space)
The power of working as a software team:- 3 people are working on a feature. I join them. 1 person leaves.- We implement part of a feature, which helps me understand what’s going on. I take a turn at driving and we implement another part.- 2 people leave for lunch, since we’re in different timezo…
Screenshot of the linked post below.
Dare Obasanjo (@carnage4life@mas.to)
Every big company process exists because someone screwed up or because the company was scared of someone screwing up. What most companies lack is a culture that asks “Did we overreact and should we roll some of this back?” It’s a game changer once leaders encourage this approach