Practical insights on platform engineering, developer experience, and building teams that ship. Each issue is written to be useful, actionable, and applicable. No filler, no promotions-only emails. Enter your email and sign up for free right now.
Weekly Reflection #11 - Intuition and Experimentation
|
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) InsightThe feedback loop between intuition and experimentation is a superpower. It is the difference between scanning a room with a very dim floodlight and a laser. Our intuition uses the dim floodlight carefully processed by our peripheral vision. It allows us to take the room in all at once, but we risk turning the dance of shadows into monsters that aren't there. Our experiment is the laser. It requires our conscious attention at the expense of the larger perspective. When we listen to our intuition and test our hypothesis as cheaply and as easily as possible, we unlock this superpower. Wisdom"If you fight against all your sensations, you will have no standard to which to refer, and thus no means of judging even those sensations which you claim are false."
— Epicurus, Principal Doctrines
If you don't trust your own experience, you lose the only foundation you have for making any judgment at all. ReflectionWhat is your floodlight picking up that deserves a focused experiment? Lagniappe
|
Weekly Reflections Newsletter
Practical insights on platform engineering, developer experience, and building teams that ship. Each issue is written to be useful, actionable, and applicable. No filler, no promotions-only emails. Enter your email and sign up for free right now.
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight This week LiteLLM, the most popular open-source LLM proxy in the python ecosystem, was hit by a really gnarly software supply chain attack. The awful part was that the attack vector was through Trivy, a security scanner LiteLLM trusted to help protect its code. Attackers compromised Trivy's GitHub Actions and used that to steal LiteLLM's PyPI publishing credentials, and used them...
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight In Will Larson's book, Crafting Engineering Strategy, he nails why so many executives fail at executing on strategy. However, my experience is that engineering strategies fail for very mundane reasons—the most common of which is that executives assume their strategy will roll itself out. The second most common reason is forgetting to spend time validating the details. Both are...
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight It is easy to treat Change Management as a means of controlling the change itself, as if changes were discrete events you could shove into a box on a specific timeline. But change is continuous, it's fluid, and it's much more powerful than any of us can truly control. Systems were changing long before we intervened, and they will continue to change long after we are gone. Surfers...