I like this idea from Lorin Hochstein about focusing more on the almost-incidents in our products:

Because most of our incidents are novel, and because near misses are a source of insight about novel future incidents, if we are serious about wanting to improve reliability, we should be treating our near misses as first-class entities, the way we do with incidents.

I imagine that a culture of “post near-incident reviews” could be really beneficial for the resiliency of our products—and our ability to predict and avoid some of the really catastrophic incidents.

Michael Lopp has a great post about “managing up”, including how problematic that term is:

To me, “Managing Up” has that “your boss’s job is more important than yours” feel, which pisses me off. Your boss’s job isn’t more important than yours; it’s different.

He goes on to share some great advice for what to share with your manager, and when. For instance, when to share something immediately:

Unexpected developments. A situation appears in front of you, a non-threatening one but unexpected. Strange. Something is up, but you can’t discern the backstory story or the intent. It is unfamiliar. Tell your manager. Now. Just a brief note. A heads up. It’s probably nothing—it usually is—but there is a chance your manager’s context plus your suspicions equals additional clarity.

I finally had a chance to make my way through Liz Pelly’s Spotify exposé that’s been making the rounds, and it is so infuriating. Definitely worth reading the whole thing, but the short version is that Spotify is seeding their most popular playlists with generic “background music” that they pay even lower royalties for. A good summary of the issue:

A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.

I’ve been on the fence about streaming services for a while, but I think going forward I want to use both my Kindle and Spotify in the same way. Sample a book/album to see if I like it, and then buy it in physical form (or Bandcamp!) if I do. Like when we used to listen to CDs in the record store to decide if it’s worth spending that precious music budget on.

This is lovely post by John Arundel (“Come for the schadenfreude, stay for the thought-provoking advice” indeed!). I especially like the section on how to become a good manager:

If you want to become a great manager, which I think is the only kind worth being, start practicing now. Learn people skills, communication, collaboration, psychology. Work on understanding the things that make different kinds of people tick. Manage yourself excellently. If you can’t organize yourself, how do you expect to be responsible for a team?

In Code shufflin’ Robin Rendle writes about why he, as a designer, still messes around with coding projects. I think this is why I continue to obsess over my side project as well—and proactively reach out to indie devs who use the Cloudflare platform to see if I can help.

I’d forgotten what it feels like not to ask permission for changes and instead make pull requests and break things. There’s a momentum to this sort of work that I crave deep down in my bones because it doesn’t rely on meetings or six months of quarterly planning or going up the chain of command. And what I love most about shuffling code around is that every day there’s progress, every day there’s a tiny degree of success you can point to.

I love the Murderbot books, and this interview with author Martha Wells is a delight:

Of all her characters, Wells has said, Murderbot is the one she’s put the most of herself into. It’s a surprising claim, until it’s not. It’s obvious that Wells feels a distance from other humans, even as she’s spent a life trying to relate to them, to understand them.

This is a really interesting rebuttal of some modern parenting methods by Marilyn Simon:

The job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it.

Lots of great planning advice in this First Round article. There are two things related to Strategy that I especially like. First, this definition (Strategy is not a vague vision statement!):

Strategy is the sequencing of how you take a very long-term end goal and break that down into more digestible components. Done right, it gets you a really clear picture of what’s in your long-, mid-, and short-term plans, where you stack up in the market, and how you’ll win.”

And then, the importance of org design in executing that strategy well:

Org design is how you deliver on your plan. Instead of meticulously planning all of the ‘what,’ the right org design will give you the ability to hand a talented group of people a new goal, and have them continuously come up with the best way to achieve it.

The post also covers another topic I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is the cadence for planning, and how to make the quarterly (or however often you do it) planning cycle less painful/stressful. We’re in our annual planning cycle right now—once we’re done I will write a post that touches on these topics, and more.