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Here is how I approach starting a new job

Elena Verna has some really good tips for ramping up in a new job in this post:

If you over-index on action, you’ll likely misfire because you’re missing context. But if you over-index on just learning, you’ll create anxiety and unmet expectations around you. It’s a tough balance to strike. Assuming you are learning at max velocity, here is how I deal with ‘take action’ part: start with protecting what’s already working, move onto quick wins, go after big bets, and finish with the strategy.

I am inclined to move the strategy piece up (see my post about product strategy) and work on that before “big bets” so that you can build confidence that you know what the product is, who the users are, and how it makes money. Small quibbles about the order of things aside, I agree with all the details!

Source: Here is how I approach starting a new job

Childhood leukemia: how a deadly cancer became treatable

Some of the charts here are a little hard to parse, but this is pretty incredible.

In the top panel, you can see that in the 1960s, only around 14% of children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia survived at least five years. Despite initially improving upon treatment, most relapsed and died soon after. By the 2010s, the chances of survival had increased dramatically: 94% of children survived at least five years.

Source: Childhood leukemia: how a deadly cancer became treatable

You cannot survive poor management

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

Essential Reading for Agentic Engineers

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!

Read Essential Reading for Agentic Engineers

Some Products Just Aren’t Big Companies

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.

Some Products Just Aren’t Big Companies

New advice for aspiring managers

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!

New advice for aspiring managers

Automatic syncing from Raindrop.io to WordPress link posts

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.

On estimates as navigation, not promises

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.

On estimates as navigation, not promises

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