Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. — Dwight Eisenhower Quote Investigator The details of a plan which was designed years in advance are often incorrect, but the planning process demands the thorough exploration of options and contingences. The knowledge gained during this probing is crucial to the selection of appropriate actions as future events unfold.
Remembering the strange case of the “Cookie Pizza Monster” that every Technology Meetup organiser in Lisbon became very familiar with during the years around ~2019. A few nuggets of the outrageous situations surrounding these events, where normal social conventions went out the window: 🥇 He was always one of the first to sign up right after a particular Meetup event was open 🤨 Strong suspicion of an automated process going on 🍕 Any Meetups that offered complimentary food (usually pizza) were especially targeted 🤤 Once at the Meetup, he’d ignore all the talks and dash for the pizzas 🥪 The modus operandi was often to fold half of a pizza a couple of times, and process to eat it like a sandwich 🔁 Rinse and repeat until full or no more pizzas 🛍️ At one occasion he even brought refrigerator plastic bags to start filling with the available finger food 😤 When called out by the organiser he reluctantly stopped but was quite upset and rude 🥷 In another occasion, was caught wandering the private office areas of the company hosting the event 🪧 This despite clear signage indicating the event auditorium Although difficult situations to deal with at the time, it became an interesting inner-circle joke amongst Meetup organisers in Lisbon....
Enshittification - Wikipedia Enshittification is the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products … The term was used by writer Cory Doctorow in November 20221 … Doctorow has also used the term platform decay to describe the same concept. The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok | WIRED Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves....
“A diagram of the relationships between Unix systems” by Eraserhead1, Infinity0, Sav_vas (Wikipedia)
I’ve come to consider that it doesn’t matter too much what activity you choose to get a discussion going. What matters most is regular reflection, hearing all the voices in a team, and making progress together. — Jono Hey in Rose, Thorn, Bud - Sketchplanations
Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges) Rapid growth. The product went from zero to 5 million users in around 12 months after announcing an invite-only beta. Small team. Bluesky was built with a small team of 3 engineers during the first year, and with 12 software engineers at the time of publication.
The differences in British and American spelling - Oxford International English Schools The main difference is that British English keeps the spelling of words it has absorbed from other languages, mainly French and German. Whilst American English spellings are based mostly on how the word sounds when it is spoken. Follow the link for more details on typical differences in nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc.
Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man. — Aristotle
It’s time to be outcome driven - Felipe Castro - OKR Trainer, Speaker, Author As Benedict Evans points out, humans have a clear tendency when they get new tools: There’s an old saying that when we get a new tool, we begin by making it fit the old way of working, and then we change the way we work to fit the new tool. 99% of people make OKR fit their old way of working....
Simple suggestions for technology investment. | by swardley | Apr, 2024 | Medium Wardley’s unproven method of thinking about investment. Step 1: Ignore the consultants, business gurus and analyst reports. Step 2: Gather some actual practitioners. Step 3: Ask them what matters. Step 4: Categorise the list. Step 5: Map the perspectives [Parallel] Step 6: Identify areas of investment. [Parallel] Step 7: Aggregation and comparison. TL;DR Be clear on your purpose....