Two sleeping puppies next to an orange mug and a notebook

I caught up with my YouTube, two good videos from NotJustBikes about cars and oil being bad.

I really liked all the links in leadership this week, all highly recommended.

Quote of the Week
Safe to fail — Organisations need to make it safe to execute a rollback without penalty to the developer. We’ve seen some organisations introduce failure KPIs that demand that all employees (from the CEO down) demonstrate failure at least once per year in order to receive their bonus. The argument is that if they do not demonstrate failure, they are either hiding or not taking enough risks.
#Noprojects
Evan Leybourn and Shane Hastie

Leadership

The Vasa - “Understanding why the Vasa sank also gets to something important about how organisations fail.”

TBM 417: Before You Fire All Your Glue People Because of AI - very good point, a lot of work is invisible, we might lose the context.

How Engineering Leaders Approach Strategy - Crafting Engineering Strategy by Will Larson [Podcast] - I love his blog, this is part of a review of his latest book.

Engineering

State of Radicle CI and where it’s going: April 2026 - still on my to-do list to try out.

Is Anthropic ’nerfing’ Claude? Users increasingly report performance degradation as leaders push back - I haven’t seen it, though Opus 4.7 seems a bit weird.

The Human Cost of 10x: How AI Is Physically Breaking Senior Engineers - it doesn’t actually make our life easier, we just do more.

Nineteen Features, Zero Architecture - nice experiment, maybe not totally fair.

Friends GIF cripples website discussion platform backup with 377 gigabytes of Rachel’s ‘happy dance’ - oops.

Urbanism

When Oil Gets Expensive, Cities Get Better [YouTube] - it doesn’t seem to make a difference at the moment.

Every Reason to Hate Cars [YouTube] - fully agree.

The Most Controversial Street in London [YouTube] - depending on who you ask.

Are Bike Lanes Actually Ruining Our Cities? [YouTube] - no.

Work in Progress: How we’re tackling Sidewalk Sheds (with John Wilson) [YouTube] - why am I following the Mayor of NYC? I don’t know!

What I Stopped Thinking About When I Went Car-Free - it’s a lot of cognitive load that nobody considers.

Barcelona to standardise La Rambla terraces under new design code - nice.

Are Human Drivers Finally Obsolete? [Podcast] - Probably not, unless we ban people.

Guess the Tube Line - so much fun, if you spend some time on the Tube.

Random Tea

Health and Safe-Tea at Work: Brewing Time [YouTube] - I just discovered that Yorkshire Tea has a YouTube channel.

500 Words 12: The Future Of DJing [German] - I hope AI isn’t the future, it is a personality killer.

Barcelona’s Hospital Clínic launches first trans healthcare guide - good.

Backblaze has quietly stopped backing up your data - that’s a bit rubbish.

Join the conversation
Have thoughts on any of this post? Reply on Mastodon or find me at @cdamian@rls.social.