I like this alternative to the “Disagree and Commit” saying:

“Disagree and let’s see” allows you to stay aligned with the team without forcing you to pretend you had conviction you didn’t have. It lets you walk into a room with your team and be honest:

“Here’s the path that was chosen. It wasn’t my first pick, but here’s the experiment we’re running, and here’s what we’re trying to learn.”

That’s a much more authentic stance for most leaders than repeating something with a tight smile and hoping no one notices your doubt.

Source: “Disagree and Let’s See” →

Metadata is the hardest problem in software, and these examples prove my point. Don’t @ me!

My favourite: a band named brouillard, with a single member called brouillard, whose every single album is named brouillard, and of course, so is every single track.

Source: Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music →

Lorin Hochstein is a big name in the LFI (Learning From Incidents) space. He often writes about post-incident reviews, and he has a very interesting write-up of the Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 blog post. I especially loved this part:

Companies generally err on the side of saying less rather than more. After all, if you provide more detail, you open yourself up to criticism that the failure was due to poor engineering. The fewer details you provide, the fewer things people can call you out on. It’s not hard to find people online criticizing Cloudflare online using the details they provided as the basis for their criticism.

I think it would advance our industry if people held the opposite view: the more details that are provided an incident writeup, the higher esteem we should hold that organization. I respect Cloudflare is an engineering organization a lot more precisely because they are willing to provide these sorts of details. I don’t want to hear what Cloudflare should have done from people who weren’t there, I want to hear us hold other companies up to Cloudflare’s standard for describing the details of a failure mode and the inherently confusing nature of incident response.

Source: Brief thoughts on the recent Cloudflare outage →

Some tough love here about what it means to have “executive presence”.

When someone tells you that you need more business sense, or that you’re not ready for more scope, or that you need to level up, this is typically what they’re trying to communicate. That you’re more concerned with how work happens than with what work should happen in the first place.

Source: The price of admission →

A great list of things to keep in mind when communicating via writing. The article is focused on “managing up” but these principles are relevant in a much broader context as well.

What questions does your manager usually ask? Answer those questions yourself. If you take anything away from this article, make it this. Every manager has their own idiosyncrasies, worldview, values, etc. That’s why the best thing to do is to pattern match. Consider what they’ve asked you in the past, when talking to you or others. Try to give context through that lens.

Source: How I give the right amount of context (in any situation) →

This is an essay I think everyone should read, front to back. It’s about all the things we are living through right now, but it’s especially about work (and AI):

I’m not sure hiring can ever be much more efficient, because neither side has reason to show themselves as they really are, warts and all. Idealistically, both would come straight; pragmatically, it is a game of chicken. Candidates polish résumés and present curated versions of their abilities, listing outcomes and impact statistics with dubious accuracy and provenance. Companies do the same, putting culture and mission front and center while hiding systematic dysfunctions and looming existential risks. When neither side is forthcoming, you’re left with proxies: a famous logo on a resume, a polished culture deck.

Source: Selling Lemons →

Wild story:

Multiple people we spoke to for this story lamented feeling “ganged up on” as a partner used chatbot outputs against them during arguments or moments of marital crisis. One of these sources, a man who’s now in the process of selling his home as he and his spouse barrel toward divorce, recounted feeling voiceless as his partner turned to ChatGPT to pathologize their relationship. “I was really hurt by the way [ChatGPT] was being used against me,” said the man, speaking through tears. “I felt like it was being leveraged… like, ‘I didn’t feel great about whatever happened, and so I went to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT said that you’re not a supportive partner, and this is what a supporting partner would do.’”

I think we have to realize that non-tech people don’t have a good understanding of the sycophantic nature of LLM bots, so we’ll see more and more examples like this.

Source: ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as It Goads Spouses Into Divorce →

This is a beautifully-written love letter to the CD—and I agree completely:

The commitment for the listener is light—one press of the button—and the challenge for the artist is pleasantly tough. You have to make all the songs work in a row, and there is a very good chance the listener will hear the entire album. One long unbroken work is also like a stage play, which is what I knew best in high school. […] The CD still delights me and helps me frame the idea of a collected set of songs.

Source: Requiem for a Beam →

This resonates so hard. The tech industry’s obsession with LARPing roles in the public sphere has really hurt our ability to work with people who care and want to do the best work of their lives without distractions.

I think it’s unlikely the industry will get much better at identifying and evaluating candidates anytime soon. And so I’m sure we’ll continue to see posts about the importance of your LinkedIn profile, or your GitHub, or your passion project. But you neglect at your peril the engineers who are working nine-to-five days at boring companies.

Source: The illegible nature of software development talent →