Christof Damian: 10.2023

beach on Lanzarote with dark volcanic mountains and some small boats

I decided to stop posting depressing links and keep only the interesting and uplifting content.

This makes the list smaller and me more happy.

Leadership

TBM 247: 15 Metaphors for Waste In Product Development - excellent summary. I recognise all of them in past jobs.

Engineering

Open source advocacy: The benefits of open source software [Podcast] - another one of these, apparently necessary, since many people are moving in a more closed direction.

Automating product deprecation - most of this doesn't apply to smaller organisations, but I like the idea of a "deprecation playbook"

Remote execution in the GNOME tracker - interesting vulnerability, the comments are also pretty good.

Urbanism

Africa's urban future: Tanzania [Podcast] - they seem to be mostly investing in buses with dedicated lanes, which is a start.

Why health and wellbeing should be at centre of urban planning - “Creating environments where every essential is within a 15-minute walk or bike ride fosters consistent physical activity. This diminishes risks associated with a sedentary lifestyle and elevates air quality,”

SPD will Straffreiheit für Schwarzfahrer [German] - some plans to stop treating travel without a ticket as a criminal offence, which could lead to prison.

Stockholm to ban petrol and diesel cars from centre from 2025 - I really wish more cities would dare this.

Project Green Light’s work to reduce urban emissions using AI - no mention of pedestrians or cyclists.

Random Waves

Deborah Greaves [Podcast] - about harvesting energy from waves.

Sucking It Up - Tim about being a "White Male TechBro Boomer".

Pizza, plum cake and pickled red onion: how school lunches look across Europe - I vote for Sweden.

Leadership

Managing cost efficiency at scale-ups [Podcast] - nothing surprising, but still good

S5, Ep. 20: What's Up With Performance Improvement Plans? [Podcast] - interesting that they can be weaponised and figuring this out is nearly impossible.

Wisdom for Work #17 - The Power of Retrospectives: Learning From the Past To Shape the Future [Podcast] - if you do anything "agile", start with retrospectives.

Unlocking Peak Performance: The ROI of Investing in DEI (with Dr. Vijay Pendakur, Organizational Development Strategist) [Podcast] - "DEI is not about shrinking one person's slice of pie, but rather expanding the pie for everyone."

Garry Ridge: The stunning business impact of WD40’s Culture First strategy [Podcast] - I don't agree with all of it, but it is a good listen.

How to Apologize - it will come up again.

Solving the Engineering Strategy crisis. - speaking notes, from a talk.

Engineering

RoboCop 3 - Dongle Anti-Piracy that Failed | MVG [YouTube] - that didn't go well, even with all the effort.

Software Design by Example - I haven't seen this before, it's neat.

Open source is at a crossroads [Podcast] - insights into licences and how they affect the community.

Postgres: a Better Message Queue than Kafka? - keep it boring, if you can.

Work

Why Meetings Suck and How to Fix Them - I think everybody agrees on this.

RTO vs WFH: my default recommendations for remote vs colocated teams - fascinating way of classifying types of work and good overview of how the RTO/WFH arguments are often over the top.

The Seven Meetings You Hate - 100%

workspaces.xyz - another pretty workspaces site / newsletter.