Week 5, 2025 - Happy Birthday!
This Sunday will mark the first anniversary of this blog and newsletter. Re-reading my Hello World post and the first Friday update, not much has changed. One of my strengths is consistency, but I need to stop sometimes and look back, to ensure I’m still going in the right direction and not just blindly following a habit. I’ll try to do that in this issue.
📋 What I learned this week year
First, numbers. This blog has 281 subscribers, on average, that’s more than one new person every workday. It’s crazy to realize that a small concert venue worth of people are following my thoughts. I feel gratitude for the audience and am aware of the responsibility to ensure you get what you signed up for.
During this one year, the site was visited by 91.000 people, the vast majority of them coming in on my most popular article about managing people during stressful times. The majority of this traffic was coming from the front page of Hacker News, and the comments there made me post a follow-up a bit later.
The cost of this site, including hosting at Pikapods, domain registration and other services at Cloudflare, and email service from Mailgun add up to around $60. (I didn’t count the minimal expense for self-hosting my analytics stack at home, and of course, neither the time I put into this.) Let’s embrace that number for a second. For 5 dollars a month, I could build and maintain a system that reached close to 100.000 people, standing up to traffic peaks without breaking a sweat. There have been discussions about the end of the free internet for a while, but still, this cost is nothing compared to the value it created for me and the audience it can bring in.
Goals. When I started, my goal was to write about my engineering leadership experiences, to synthesize the ideas in my head, and also to help others on this path. Beyond that, I had a secondary goal of writing every Friday, to have a cadence I could rely on and hold myself accountable.
In these 12 months, I wrote articles that helped me see clearer and more structural while getting positive feedback from my readers. The popularity of posts about dealing with negative behavior, representing unpopular decisions, impostor syndrome, and focus showed that there’s a need for this kind of content despite the sea of useful material available on the web and in books. And the regular Friday cadence was more or less a success too, with just two breaks in the summer and around the end of the year.
Besides the blog and newsletter, I created a free e-book containing my articles about Getting Hired as an Engineering Manager, gave my first conference talk, and started a podcast with my friend Jeremy. This went through numerous pivots, starting from live recordings, going through a video-heavy phase, and arriving at its current incarnation as a focused Engineering Leadership guide, discussing a single topic per episode. Check out our last season to see where we are now, I’m really proud of the work we did there.
Finally, just recently I started to shape my coaching and training business, and kicked off a mini newsletter with Engineering Management puzzles.
Looking back on this year, I have mixed feelings. On one hand, I would’ve liked to progress more on areas that are important for me - but on the other hand, I’m happy with what I achieved, especially because above all these, I have a much clearer vision on what I want to do in the future.
🤔 Articles that made me think
Garmin’s CrowdStrike Moment
It’s crazy what was going on this week in the Garmin sports watch world. The company updated an essential file that gets downloaded to devices at every sync (not at every OS update, but at every synchronization, even if it’s just a simple activity upload!), and throws the device into a reboot loop, rendering it unusable. Mistakes happen, but what stood out for me is the spectacular inability of Garmin to efficiently handle this incident. At least 8 hours passed during which the corrupted file was still kept on being pushed to more and more watches, temporarily bricking them – despite numerous users, including national distributors ringing the bells. Garmin stayed quiet, so all users could do was help each other on online forums. The lesson is that if you’re a company causing an incident, this should be your order of priorities:
1️⃣ COMMUNICATE
2️⃣ MITIGATE
3️⃣ REMEDIATE
Let your users know what’s happening, help them stop the bleeding with whatever means possible, and then fix the issue for good. Garmin ignored communication until they had a fix - leaving thousands of frustrated users in doubt for most of the day in Europe.
The Verge has moved to WordPress
Just a small post on the site, but another major milestone towards the end of the era of publishers building their in-house Content Management Systems. Chorus, the CMS trying to elevate media companies to tech businesses, is quietly retired to give place for an open-source CMS. The era of efficiency forces publishing companies to focus on their core business, and give up finding new areas to compete in. Survival instead of growth.
EM 2 IC
On the note of companies optimizing costs and flattening organizations, another trend is Engineering Managers considering a career switch to hands-on development. I often write about the IC-to-EM transition, because I believe the world needs more great managers, but this path is not for everyone, and to be fair, I did see a few ex-managers having successful IC careers now. David Loftesness went through a similar change and shares his learnings, including a practical 90-day plan for this less-discussed career move. Do what makes you happy.
Was it Ethical to Hack Deepseek?
Interesting discussion, considering Deepseek has no bug bounty program or any similar pre-approval of penetration testing. I understand it might not be 100% legal what happened here, but the alternative (not publishing the results of a simple subdomain discovery and port scan, after notifying the company and making sure they closed the door) would’ve been much worse. Half the internet is feeding their personal data into a leaky system that’s obviously a target of malicious actors too. It’s like seeing a key in a neighbor’s door: do you grab it (arguably illegal) to return later, or just walk away?
⌚ Something cool: Re-Pebble!
Eric Migicovsky, cofounder of Beeper, the chat application I use every day, is back reviving an earlier project of his: Pebble, thanks to Google open-sourcing PebbleOS. The Pebble was my first smartwatch, and it’s a testament to the cute and efficient UX that my daughters loved it too when we found it in a drawer a few years ago. I’m not sure I would swap my Apple Watch for a new Pebble, but I’m rooting for them to make a successful comeback. The timing is right: more and more people are ok with less but better thought-through features, especially if it helps them manage the stress of being always connected. (See also this amazing DIY project of a single-purpose blood glucose monitoring watch!) The Pebble team learned a lot (some of which are shared in this great article), so fingers crossed!
That’s it for today, have some cake this weekend,
Péter