Curated Content April 2024
A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in April 2024.
Articles
OSQI (Open Source Quality Institutes)
This is an incredibly interesting proposal, with compelling research behind it, on the value of governments developing and funding an Open Source Quality Institute.
Given how much commerce runs on the back of open source infrastructure code, and the threat models associated getting more complex and sophisticated, investment in this way makes sense.
Debugging Leadership Growth
Aviv Ben-Yosef highlights 5 common failure modes of leaders in different organizations, what they are usually verbalized as by executives, and some questions to ask yourself as a leader in order to understand how they may have happened, and resolve them.
I have found myself asking each of them at various times and various organizations, and I'd recommend giving it a look to see what resonates that you're struggling with, and some suggestions on how to begin debugging.
Manufacturing Bliss
This article is something entirely different, and only tech in that it comes from a tech author about a trend in the Bay Area. I also haven't actually tried, and therefore experienced the results the author discusses in this article.
But this one was interesting enough that it's on my list of things to try.
The author discusses a kind of meditation that results in varied feelings, ranging from extreme bliss to feeling yourself actively at peace, rather than the traditionally described stoic detachment, which also make this one worth considering to me, because even as someone not actively battling anxiety or depression, knowing this kind of tool could be available to myself and my loved ones is incredibly compelling.
In Defense of Slow Feedback Loops
This one by Hillel is good, partially because of the clickbait title, partially because his actual defense is sometimes the slow(er) feedback loops are worthwhile because of the safety and correctness guarantees which they can give.
I agree with this, but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to shorten those feedback loops as much as humanly possible.
Building Components, and the Past and Future of Construction
Brian Potter
This one isn't software/tech at all. This one is another hobby interest of mine, in building construction, and looks at what kinds of components make up buildings and some of the challenges with creating more versus less highly integrated components for building and building onsite.
This kind of in-depth look is really compelling to me because it doesn't just scratch the surface, it goes through many of the challenges and hard constraints we face when looking to improve building construction.
Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
Jason Cohen
While this article was published in March, it's highlighting a critical point from Simon Sinek's Infinite Game, which is that often you don't have to focus on playing well, but rather just focus on avoiding playing badly enough that you lose the game, and can no longer play.
Keep yourself in to play another hand is the most critical activity that any startup can be involved in and this article probably does a better job of illustrating that than almost any other resource I've seen. Jason is a super fun writer, so his style makes this a great read if you're curious about the topic at all.
Elixir Machine Learning: Using Pre-trained ONNX Models with Ortex
This one is a great Elixir specific article highlighting how well it can slot in existing machine learning and AI technology into your stack to serve them in a robust and reliable way, even if you don't train your models or build them natively in an Elixir based stack.
Books
Sadly it's been a slow year for recommendable books, and I don't have any for this month either.
Conf Talks
No conf talks this month.
Podcasts
No podcasts this month.
Microposts
I'm sure there were some, because I can't stop from checking Mastodon, but I didn't record any, so none for this month.