Short-form insights you can read in under 5 minutes.
The RFG community is where practitioners and innovators of the craft of continuous improvement learn from, support, collaborate with and befriend each other.
There are perhaps many true communities in our industry but each one is a rare and priceless in helping thoughtful humans achieve purpose, embrace hope, and build mastery.
It rarely makes sense to engineer novel solutions to solved problems.
Mark Rickmeier bummed I’m not joining. Last year’s hike in Portugal was the most important and healing time I took for myself last year. I look forward to future invites! 2025???
Let’s move past prototyping and into real world software engineering. I see demonstrations of agent workflows using large parameter LLM’s at each step including solved problems like: traversing code dependencies, parsing structured outputs, and math. Incorporating less novel components may take longer but will perform at lower compute cost and with greater predictability.
I believe we often overlook the importance of mental health awareness among younger generations. While they face unique challenges, their openness about mental health is a positive shift. We must recognize that simply restricting technology won't solve deeper societal issues. It's crucial to address the broader context of their experiences, including the impact of global events and socio-economic factors.
Your software is unmaintainable by design.
That is, deciders have sacrificed quality through what they care about, what they reward, and their choices. Poor quality is an unintended company value.
In these situations, accelerating tools like AI code generation are more likely to increase the problem than reduce it.
To break the pattern, it’s up to leaders to champion software quality. Start by listening to the people on your teams who know what it takes to achieve it.
Prioritize reliable, performant, accessible, useable, and scalable execution by tying it to long term business outcomes. Make quality an ethical imperative in service of your customers.
Use productivity enhancements as an opportunity to invest focus, time, and money to measurably improve quality over time.
Embrace respect for coworkers. Trust but verify, of course, AND treat dignity and well-being as a human right. We will all perform better as a result.
There’s a special kind of tired when I have narrow focused on something like writing code to my endurance limit which is best remedied by either a walk outside - or - one neat glass of good whiskey.
Having options is a privilege but sometimes we have more choice than we believe. And making a choice, even a bitter one, may help you feel less trapped. With time it may help reduce regret. It has for me.
Thanks Ahmed! And congratulations.
Had no idea this was in the works. Quite a dramatic change for the tech services industry at all scales https://lnkd.in/eAW3YANE
Experienced the fearsome power of “must” in a chat prompt. The llm unswervingly does what you want or its best hallucination of it.
The word “should” appears to lack such power. A sign of how little should connects to doing in the written transcript of our human world.