David Edgar's website

Saturday, 11 May 2024

Gosh, Gruber is on a tear finding examples to prove to people that their lived experience is wrong.

Wednesday, 08 May 2024

πŸ”– A Useful Productivity Measure?

Another idea on measuring engineering productivity via value add.

πŸ”– Productivity Measurement as a Tradeoff

A followup to two earlier responses to the McKinsey Engineering Productivity article

Tuesday, 07 May 2024

I hate the idea of LLMs being used as a way to diminish human expression and reduce it to serial magic eight balls, and all. But I gave my Stack Overflow contributions, as meagre as they are, to humanity and to a collective knowledge. Trying to petulantly take that back from the community because the host is also going to give it to OpenAI would be a pretty shitty act.

Our old television died and I had to replace it with a high definition. It makes everything look like it was filmed in the cheap. It can’t be that everything I watch is soap opera level bad production. Is high def really this bad?

Sunday, 05 May 2024

Looking around the rest of the audience of this Nick Cave gig I’m wondering what they’ve been doing for the last two hours since the 16:00 meal service?

πŸ”– How to send progress updates

πŸ”– Agile Rehab: Replacing Process Dogma with Engineering to Achieve True Agility

All unhappy agile teams are alike. Each happy agile team is happy in its own way

πŸ”– Conway’s Law in Team Topolgies: Did you really get it?

πŸ”– Your Small Imprecise Ask Is a Big Waste of Their Time

Being better about asking for the right thing to the right person at the right time

πŸ”– The unwritten laws of engineering at Stedi

πŸ”– The 37signals Guide to Internal Communication

At the risk of it including a line like "Being a massive sook arsehole is a-ok."

πŸ”– GitLab Handbook: How to embrace asynchronous communication for remote work

Saturday, 04 May 2024

Am I a thief? No, it’s ethics that is wrong.

How do other people stop their brain yelling at them all the time?

πŸ”– Why you need a "WTF Notebook"

As someone who struggles with focus control this would a really valuable thing to do. Parking things but having a record of them being parked, rather than forgetting until the next time, would alleviate stress and also make me more effective in the moment.

It is the slowing down, not reacting, and writing it down that I also struggle with though.

Thursday, 02 May 2024

Employer had a bunch of old Apple equipment around that we can’t really hand to new employees any longer, even if we were hiring. So I arranged with the org to just give it to any employees that wanted it. No charge, just take it away so I don’t need to pack it up in a fortnight when we move offices. Took names and then handed it out.

Unfortunately we didn’t have any chargers to give with the laptops nor keyboards/mice to give with the desktops. Bemused at how multiple people managed to make it seem like I was ripping them off πŸ₯΄

Thursday, 25 April 2024

πŸ”– The Cloud Under The Sea

Another look at the intercontinental cable laying industry, 28 years after Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Motherboard

πŸ”– Mother Earth Motherboard

Neal Stephenson's epic article from 1996 on the trans-continental cable laying industry.

Wednesday, 24 April 2024

Never mind not going to make it. I’m unconvinced we as a species deserve to make it through the Great Filter.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2019411

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