Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight I have to come clean. I've been putting off one of the most-recommended books in our field for years: The Mythical Man-Month. I can't believe, after co-hosting Book Overflow for almost two years, we hadn't read this yet. Martin Fowler's recent post finally got me to take the plunge, and boy was I missing out! My favorite idea in the book is conceptual integrity. Conceptual...
13 days ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Tony Fadell tells a story in his book, Build, about his time at General Magic. The place was filled with brilliant people, but they had no shipping rhythm and no external pressures. Years passed and the work drifted, missing chances to prove it out with customers. He argues that the way to combat this is with "heartbeats and handcuffs". Heartbeats are an internal cadence....
21 days ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight No matter how much weight I can lift, I always start with an empty bar. Ten reps. A focus on perfect form. A kinetic meditation. It reminds me to leave my ego at the door. It lets me listen to my body. How do I feel today? Am I creaky? Am I great? Then I put in the real work. I progressively load up the bar and push myself to grow. The same goes with software. Don't skip the...
28 days ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Martial artists have been practicing katas for centuries: solo forms, repeated until the movements become muscle memory. Dave Thomas brought the idea to code. Mark Richards and Neal Ford brought it to software architecture in Fundamentals of Software Architecture. What I love about katas is that they are disciplined play with a purpose. The engineers who run katas develop astute...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Claude Shannon juggled in the hallways of Bell Labs. He built a flame-throwing trumpet. He rode a unicycle through the office. He was also the father of information theory, the mathematical foundation that drives every digital system you've ever touched. Shannon relentlessly followed problems that fascinated him. Information theory started as a puzzle he couldn't put down. He was...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Things change. Requirements change. Teams change. And yet, the systems we build have to live through all of it. One of my favorite software engineering books is Building Evolutionary Architectures. This book introduced me to one of my favorite software architecture concepts: fitness functions. These are executable checks that encode what "healthy" means for your system. If you've...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight After 18 years in tech, I've come to a realization that's been hiding in plain sight: my tagline "ship with confidence" was never a metaphor. I'm pivoting rojoroboto to maritime logistics consulting, effective immediately. Container orchestration, continuous delivery, optimizing for flow: I've been training for this my entire career without realizing it. Time to batten down the...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight This week LiteLLM, the most popular open-source LLM proxy in the python ecosystem, was hit by a really gnarly software supply chain attack. The awful part was that the attack vector was through Trivy, a security scanner LiteLLM trusted to help protect its code. Attackers compromised Trivy's GitHub Actions and used that to steal LiteLLM's PyPI publishing credentials, and used them...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight In Will Larson's book, Crafting Engineering Strategy, he nails why so many executives fail at executing on strategy. However, my experience is that engineering strategies fail for very mundane reasons—the most common of which is that executives assume their strategy will roll itself out. The second most common reason is forgetting to spend time validating the details. Both are...
2 months ago • 1 min read