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Weekly Reflection #9 - Deliberate Effort and FOMO
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Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) InsightWe, as builders and software engineers, are here to think deeply about new problems that have never been solved before. That's the work. And yet there's world-class FOMO peddling in AI discourse right now. I recently saw a tweet posted to the Book Overflow Discord to the effect of, "If my engineers aren't running ten concurrent agents, I'll fire them," and suddenly many are questioning their personal workflow. I get the temptation. LLMs feel like magic. But they are also master bullshitters who dangerously amplify complicated solutions if you're not careful. They're not the right tools for the deep, contemplative, and creative work required to push things forward on their own. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying, mistaken, or selling you something. My antidote to the FOMO machine is a phrase commonly attributed to the US Navy SEALs, "slow is smooth, smooth is fast." Frantic effort feels productive, but it's mostly thrashing. Deliberate effort feels slower at first, but it builds a foundation that outpaces the taillight chasers with compounding returns over time. Wisdom"... the greatest limitation in writing software is our ability to understand the systems we are creating." — John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design ReflectionWhat type of problems do you neglect when you're spread too thin? 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 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...