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 #29 - Be the Rubber Duck
|
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) InsightI love solving problems. So when someone brings me one, my first instinct is to hand over the answer. Coaching, mentoring, and being a father have taught me that instinct almost always gets in the way. What people need more than my answer is a rubber duck. In software, a rubber duck is the thing you explain your problem to, out loud, line by line. It never gives advice; it just waits. More often than not, you hear your own answer before you finish. So when someone comes to me, I try to be the duck. I ask a clarifying question, notice what they keep circling back to, and mostly stay quiet. It's amazing how much the other person can solve when I get out of their way. WisdomThe quality of your attention determines the quality of other people's thinking.
Nancy Kline, Time to Think
ReflectionWhere do you jump to advice when someone just needs you to listen? 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 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...
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight At PlatformCon 2026, Kelsey Hightower gave a talk titled ZTA: Zero Token Architecture (a name he admits isn't really a thing, but it sort of is now, isn't it?). The whole idea comes down to: don't outsource your ability to think, just because these tools exist. One of his examples involves working with database tables. Someone teaches an AI agent to build one, then asks it to...
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...