Week 24, 2025 - Connections and Sheets
Coincidentally, this week, the power of in-person discussions came up in multiple talks. Written communication, while having the benefits like speed and asynchronicity, misses a bunch of nuances that can be critical during conflicts. A voice call is better; you get a lot of hidden meaning from the tone, speed, and other aspects. Video calls, even better, conveying a bunch of nonverbal clues. Still, there’s something extra that’s hard to grasp that happens when you’re in the same physical space with another human being, doing something together, sharing a meal, having a drink.
At Gawker, having been a distributed team with two main locations in Budapest and New York, we made it an obligatory part of every engineer's onboarding to visit the other hub. It was super expensive, but the shared physical experience made every subsequent communication that much easier: misunderstandings and frustrations were less frequent, and even async discussions on PR reviews, Jira tickets, and Hipchat became more efficient.
I still believe that truly distributed companies have a huge advantage in being able to hire top talent from around the world, but if they don’t invest in frequent offsites where folks can meet in person, they’ll struggle with various communication, engagement, efficiency, and similar issues.
(I wrote in detail about remote Engineering Management in one of my first articles.)
This week on Leadtime.tech I looked into the challenges around the rare but frustrating case of having to manage an engineer who ended up in our team due to layoffs, and is overqualified for the work we can give them. Read it here if you missed it.
📋 Stuff I learned this week
Last week I mentioned integrating all my various contents under a single search interface – well, this week I realized that every Meilisearch update requires a manual database dump - import process. It’s so frustrating because all my services in Docker get easily auto-updated when there’s an incremental new version, except for this one.
Anyway, I had to do something I hate, pinning a version for now:
image: getmeili/meilisearch:v1.15.0
These things have a tendency to stick and be forgotten, and upgrades across multiple versions are much more likely to cause problems. So, sometime soon I’ll have to research / vibe code an automated update script to have this taken care of.
🤔 Articles that made me think
Tech Work in Tokyo
Good summary and myth-busting / confirmations about Japanese work stereotypes. Adler’s thoughts are particularly interesting about the perceived glass ceiling in career advancements as a non-native speaker: it’s not racism, it’s lower performance, because of language and cultural barriers.
9 Questions to Ask When You Start to Notice Underperformance
Performance management is hard enough when there is a clear gap between expectations and deliveries. It’s even harder when the difference is not so clear, and we just have a gut feeling that something’s off. It’s this grey zone where we’re still debating internally whether this is just a one-time slip, one that we’ll forget in a few days when the person returns to their old rhythm, or the first step of something more severe. Claire Lew offers great questions for this zone of uncertainty to get a better understanding of the person’s context and discover what support they might need.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI Collaboration
Interesting thoughts about a missing (?) tool that would allow people to collaborate, version control, comment, etc., about the AI prompts themselves that are used to generate documents and code. There’s a superb analogy in here: asking a colleague to review an AI-generated piece of code is like asking them to validate a minified javascript file: since the prompt that generated the output is missing, there’s no context, and much less chance to catch any fundamental problems.
📊 Something cool: Google Sheets MCP
Those of you who know me besides this newsletter are familiar with the fact that I’m a huge fan of spreadsheets, specifically Google’s version. I just love the simplicity of the grid approach, the flexibility of formulas, and the fact that it’s all programmable via Apps Script. Most of my ideas, quick back-of-the-napkin calculations, researches, or pet projects start as a spreadsheet.
The other day, I checked if someone wrote an MCP to connect LLMs with Google Sheets, and of course, they did. Installing was not super straightforward (hint: you too will probably need an absolute path of uv or uvx in the Claude Desktop MCP config), and a bit tedious too, because I didn’t trust my main Google account with this, having to create a separate one from scratch.
But once done, I tried with a simple prompt with Claude Sonnet 4:
Create a new sheet where you analyse the differences and similarities between bitcoin and gold. Do a research to find out important metrics (like something similar to total market cap, yearly newly mined amount, current value, etc. - figure out what matters most to be able to compare these two financial assets).
And the resulting spreadsheet, while not perfect, is still a pretty amazing first try for a zero-interaction single-prompt exercise.
That’s it for today, create something cool this weekend,
Péter