Yes, amen to this.
As a manager, be honest to your executives and your reports. Given enough people in your team, there is no tactical decision that will make your engineers work faster. Your only real option is to admit early that your deadline is untenable, and replan by reducing features, or extending deadlines. Whipping your engineers to work harder has never worked, and will ruin their trust in you forever.
Source: You cannot survive poor management ↗
Great list of resources here by Pete Steinberger:
These resources will help you master the new paradigm of AI-assisted development, where agents become true collaborators that can handle entire codebases and ship production features. Each piece was chosen for its practical, real-world insights.
I especially appreciate that it’s a combination of articles (yay!) and videos (not for me!), and that he provides a nice overview of each so you can decide if you want to click through or not. Excellent curation, would recommend!
This take on the Pocket shutdown resonates with me real hard:
“What began as a read-it-later app”, they assert, “evolved into something much bigger.” That was the whole problem: the mistake that led ultimately to this “difficult decision” by Mozilla. Pocket was a good tool. Its integration with Kobo, another excellent tool, made it that much more valuable to users like me. We didn’t need “something much bigger”. But by trying to turn Pocket into something much bigger, Mozilla actually killed it.
I feel like nothing has changed since I wrote about this kind of thing in… 2012:
This is the core of the disappointment that many of us feel with the Sparrow acquisition. It’s not about the $15 or less we spent on the apps. It’s not about the team’s well-deserved payout. It’s about the loss of faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens.
Great advice here for new managers in this wild time we find ourselves in. In general:
Whereas the previous focus of managers was to rapidly hire and scale their teams, today’s focus is on expanding impact. This is because in today’s macroeconomic environment, output is key. In the eyes of a 2025 company, the more that you can do with fewer people, the better. There are very few additional people to go around, so the focus is on how you can help your team do more with less.
James focuses specifically on EMs, but the advice definitely applies to PMs too, so check out his post if this is you!
I read Ethan Marcotte’s Link bug this week, which led me to Sophie Koonin’s Automated weekly links posts with raindrop.io and Eleventy, and that is such a cool idea that I had to do something similar.
Thanks to getting nerdswiped by Ethan and Sophie I now have a Cloudflare Worker that takes links that I tag with blog on Raindrop.io, and posts them (with excerpts taken from the Notes section) as link posts to this blog. You can just scroll down to see a bunch of examples.
It’s not fancy but it works beautifully! Every hour it checks for new links in Raindrop.io with the blog tag, and then it creates a posts like this:
<h1>Link title</h1> <p>This is my note about the article, with <strong>markdown</strong> support.</p> <p>→ <a href="https://example.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Article Title</a></p>
If this is something that could be useful to you, you can view the source code here and deploy to Cloudflare Workers to make it your own.
I’ve been thinking about engineering estimates a lot and need to write about it. But for now, Adam Keys sums it up nicely:
Everyone knows surprises will happen. The estimate should help the team make better decisions when they do, not box them into promises they can’t keep. The best estimates I’ve given weren’t the most accurate—they were the ones that helped teams navigate uncertainty instead of pretending it away.
Ok I love this story.
I’ve been reading a lot of Robin Wall Kimmerer lately. She tells a story in The Serviceberry that’s become a sort of guiding star for me, about the experience of a linguist who was studying a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest.
“He observes that a hunter had brought home a sizable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question […]‘Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,’ replied the hunter.”
And yes to this:
I’ve been thinking so much about what it would mean for me to “store my meat in the belly of my brother”—to give to my loved ones and communities and trust that my generosity will circle back to me when I need it. I know it’s how I want to live. It’s how I want us all to be able to live.
Great tip!
Convert GitHub repos to markdown with repo2txt, drag into Google AI Studio, and ask questions. Gemini’s massive context window makes it amazing for code comprehension.
The rest of the article goes into Peter’s AI coding workflow. I’ve mostly been using ChatGPT o3 for spec creation, but this is another compelling alternative.