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Weekly Reflection #31 - Do Less with Less
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Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) InsightYears ago, I was working at a company that cut head count. My team worried about how we would keep up with the same work. Our manager stopped us and said, "No, we'll do less with less. The company made this decision, and now we will prioritize accordingly." WisdomThere is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive
ReflectionWhere in your life are you trying to do more with less? 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...
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...