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Weekly Reflection #25 - Filling up the Tank
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Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) InsightEvery Sunday, I fill up the gas tank on our little Suzuki Vitara. I learned this from Tom Limoncelli in Time Management For System Administrators. It doesn't matter if it's a quarter empty or a quarter full. I just top it off. The ritual categorically removes a potential source of stress from my week, all from a simple little habit. WisdomA schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
ReflectionWhat recurring stress could a single weekly ritual eliminate entirely? Lagniappe
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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 I've been working with someone recently, migrating a manual, multi-step process out of Excel and into a Python workflow. It requires significant upfront work. You have to understand the task before you can automate it. But when you find the right solution, the whole thing runs without you. It's a thing of beauty. Effective automation drives the toil of a task toward zero. Wisdom...
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This week on Book Overflow, Pramod Sadalage came on to reflect on Software Architecture: The Hard Parts. He co-wrote it, along with Building Evolutionary Architectures, the book behind Weekly Reflection #19 - Design for Evolution. In our most recent interview, he described a SQL Server database with 287,000 tables. Nobody wanted to touch it, because any change might break something no one knew was connected. Pramod treats that fear as a measurement. It marks where the coupling is hidden. So...