Week 38, 2024 - Floods
Sunday evening, out of boredom, I checked my blog's stats and saw that 239 people were reading my site. I don’t share visitor statistics much, so you have to believe me that it’s not usual that 239 people read my site concurrently. Having a handful at the same time is an event! So, naturally, I first thought of either an attack, or more likely, some measurement error. Looking at the referrers though it was clear the visits were legitimate, and coming from Hacker News: my wartime leadership article made it up til the second position on the front page.
Tinkering with something personal, trying to get a little attention, and then, all of a sudden, having a military searchlight pointed at your product is a weird feeling. On the one hand, of course, I’m happy about the exposure. A bunch of folks found the content valuable enough to sign up for my newsletter, for which I’m humbled and grateful. On the other hand, of course, there is criticism for every writing, especially if it’s about a controversial subject like management under pressure. I tried to look at this as a learning opportunity about myself, to examine how I react to negative feedback, how I manage to (or how I fail to) dig into it, and separate the parts I can learn from, ignoring the rest.
Knowing myself, I was afraid that another negative effect of these 15 minutes of fame would be the distraction: making it hard to concentrate on the tasks I planned to do with my focus wandering away to check the stats, comments, subscribers, etc. So, I decided to put aside all the HN comments until the end of the week, which worked surprisingly well.
📋 What I learned this week
Thursday morning I blocked off an hour to finally process the comments on HN and write an update post reacting to some of them. This was a good exercise, while I didn’t want to change anything in the original article, there were some nuances and details I did miss, therefore, I'm grateful for the experience. Instead of modifying the original, I published an update addressing these points.
Both parts of our huge podcast episode about Interviewing for an Engineering Manager position are live: part 1, part 2. One of the lessons from this work is that editing a video podcast is magnitudes more work than audio only. We’ll try to keep on publishing an episode a week to catch up with our backlog, which has multiple recordings ready to edit and launch.
As planned, I successfully finished all the photo organizing activities I planned, including deduplication, EXIF data, and cloud backup. (Still in love with Restic!) There’s a weird bug in Immich where in some cases it lists photos at the file date instead of the one in EXIF, but I don’t have time to dig into that. It’s an exercise in “good enough”: the main point was to centralize and organize all media, and it’s living on a read-only SMB share now, so I can just replace Immich if I want to try something else in the future, without losing any data.
🎯 What I want to try next week
The majority of tech companies are nearing the yearly Feedback Cycle soon. This is a good opportunity to summarize what I think about this process and the topic of effective feedback, so I want to start working on that article.
I want to edit and publish Season 1 Episode 9 of The Retrospective podcast. We have a great discussion recorded about the final article of my Getting Hired as an Engineering Manager series: the offer stage.
🤔 Articles that made me think
You Are Going on a Quest
Rands (from the Leadership Slack fame) shares great, concise, high-level career advice for engineers, the consequences of their choice, and how to move towards the selected end goal. There are so many aspects I love, from the CTO parking lot mention to the explicit “This. Forever.” alternative. Up until the Intermediate level, the development path is pretty clear for a developer, but once someone reaches a Senior Engineer role, these questions become important, and the earlier one starts to think about them, the happier they will be in their chosen jobs.
The Complexity Paradox of ChatGPT, AI and UX
Built for Mars is my favorite UX newsletter, and I love Peter Ramsey's thorough and entertaining case studies. (I’m sure you’ve seen some before, like the one about Threads launch before it was behind a paywall.) He jumped on to analyze ChatGPT this time, and it’s a perfect illustration of the breakneck speed of AI development, where leading companies simply aren’t incentivized to polish their UX because users are showering them with money anyway.
Product is a Party, Not Chess
Kent Beck’s pissed-off (but also, self-aware) rant about separating engineers and customers. In just three short points he shows the tremendous value a close developer - end user collaboration can bring. If you’ve ever seen the face of an engineer realizing that their previous months of work will probably never be used, but on the other hand, putting up a button on the dashboard to create a shortcut would save literal hours for some, you know what he’s talking about.
📻 Something cool: AI Podcast
This came out last week, but I only had time to play with it recently. Audio Overview in NotebookLM creates a podcast-like discussion to summarize key topics in the source documents attached to a note. To test-drive it, I attached a dozen or so of my articles from my blog and clicked Generation. I’ll be honest, I was amazed by the authenticity of the results (and not just because most of it was flattery). I guess this is the combination of good training material and clever prompting, and subsequent tries would unveil similar patterns, but still, on the first listen, this is pretty cool.
(The visualization was done with ffmpeg — to be precise, I asked Claude AI to create the command that created it. I love 2024.)
That’s it for today, stay safe this weekend,
Péter