Short-form insights you can read in under 5 minutes.
I’ve come to learn coaching is tied into the power of witness. To have a safe space to speak your thoughts. To be seen doing what you believe is right. To know someone non judgmental cares and will follow up with you. To be reminded to appreciate the moments when it works. To be accepted and encouraged to move forward when it doesn’t. That’s powerful.
Genuinely love work from home but I can lose perspective. Taking a walk through Union Square farmers market to appreciate life as an impressionist painting.
My consulting pair and I made life a little better for our client yesterday as a side effect of pursuing our main mission there. That felt… fantastic.
An iteration review is about showing incremental progress to goal, informing stakeholders of immediate work to come, raising and mitigating near term risks and blockers. This doesn’t determine what to talk about but it does inform why you would spend time on any given topic.
Today I am using LLM AI to help me break up and summarize a transcript for a two hour walk through of a software system so that I can creat detailed annotations on the sequence diagram we created in the session
Back from PTO, immediately on a project. Challenged to find time for writing. Next week…
Witness today of an organization ignoring accommodations they were instructed to follow. Staff entirely empathetic and a manager who was not and who lacked the training, capability, and empathy to address the situation effectively. This is just how it’s been. That there’s something better to compare it to is evidence of some progress.
Two use cases for LLM today. 1) identify gaps between a more detailed description of work and the commitments made in an SOW. Propose changes. 2) summarize my own writeup such that each topic contains no more than 3 bullet points each no longer than 200 characters.
On PTO before starting my next consulting assignment. This time lift off in a bridged product and technical role. What I’m evolving into is in development, but I’ve come through the drama of an abrupt career shift and am forward focused. Hope. Pragmatism. Confidence. Humility.
That “Couldn’t hit a barn door with a banjo” is so common in English football as to be cliche tells you all you need to know about the joy and agony of human communication. We invent domain specific language in search of precision and out of vanity, to foster belonging and to exclude — but also because we simply love the sound of it.
Talking to Allyson Hernandez yesterday about how learning is both an existential joy and a place of vulnerability. How in-adeptness leaves me feeling insecure and a little sad. But I’ve found that if I set aside time while at the bottom of that curve to do something for which I have years of practice, it buoys my spirits and energy for the climb.
As with many things, it is a polarity. Leveraging the psychological safety earned through mastery to venture across spaces I do not know with confidence, patience, and humility.
The arc of tooling is to allow the tool wielder to focus on more context specific and valuable levels of abstraction. A carpenter doesn’t have to forge their own nails, they don’t have to hand plane their own beams to build a structure. (No one is saying they can’t if the context calls for it.)
The activities that generate value in software are understanding the problem. Solving it in ways that actually help users. With implementations that scale, evolve, and perform safely whenever needed.
Futurists can project how AI changes the nature of work and when. All that is observably true now, is that AI can — if used capably — help software professionals and craftspeople focus on these more context specific, valuable concerns.