A return to hand-written notes by learning to read & write – Google research on training models to recognize not just text in handwriting, but the actual strokes. So you could color or even edit-in-place the handwritten strokes later on. I hope someone is working on productizing this! A Remarkable/Kindle/Boox/Daylight tablet that recognizes sloppy handwriting and allows tweaking it later would make e-ink displays live up to the name. 🙃
Adjacent: Ink and Switch is publishing more of their programmable ink work lately.
If we play our cards right, the next couple years could be exciting for pen-and-paper sorts of thinkers.
Harper Reed, My LLM codegen workflow atm:
If you have a small or large project that you are procrastinating on, I would recommend giving it a shot. You will be surprised how far you can get in a short amount of time.
My hack to-do list is empty because I built everything. I keep thinking of new things and knocking them out while watching a movie or something.
The workflow includes: prompts for generating product requirements, technical specifications, project plans. It recommended tools for implementing those ideas into new and existing projects. CLI-friendly throughout, no need to change workflows to an AI-infused flavor-of-the-month. And, there are caveats for skeptics. It’s not a “everything is shiny and free from surprising consequences” sort of piece.
As if you haven’t heard it enough lately: it is, earnestly, mind blowing that we can go from a few sentences describing an idea to a working prototype in a few hours of supervising an LLM. Inevitably, we’ll learn about shortcomings, scaling problems, and pitfalls in the coming years. As ever! But, the cost function for software is going to change a lot in the coming years and, if we play our cards right, it will be a fun ride.
Improving Team Morale is not an Objective, Marc Gauthier:
- Morale is a byproduct of everything going on in the company. While improving it shouldn’t be an objective in itself, there are many reasons to pay attention to it.
- Instead of focusing on mood or morale, gather qualitative feedback on specific topics. This is more actionable and precise, and should help you address actual issues and not the resulting low morale that is just a side effect.
Morale is a second order effect of the fundamentals that managers and leadership work on. If the outcomes, process, technology, teams, and people are aligned and thoughtfully cared for, good morale is possible. If one or more are misaligned, morale and motivation can suffer.
Mikkel Malmberg makes macOS apps “for the connoisseurs,” creates lots of little web things, and has a pretty delightful YouTube channel where he shares his creation process. While you’re there, scroll to the very bottom of his webpage for a surprise.
Zed now predicts your next edit with Zeta, our new open model. I wouldn’t guess that new features in a programmer’s editor require such attention to detail in user experience and development of a specialized language model for code edits. Watching the video on how they built it show how deep they went in building this. Seems like it was worthwhile! 👍🏻
I’m delighted that there’s still plenty of room to explore for programmer’s editors. And, we’re not in a monolith corporations vs. open-source world like we have been in years decades past.
Zed is a product (and team) with big potential. It’s not yet right for me, but worth keeping an eye on.
A parable of adventures
Consider two adventurers, one setting off alone and another setting off with fellow explorers. Both in search of greater glory through software development. 🙃
One adventurer closes social media, shifts into Founder mode, and grinds out “wins” to the satisfaction of their benefactors. They move quickly, but sometimes diverge from their fellow explorers. When discarding a day’s work that solves the wrong problem is drama-free, they may have gone further than their fellow explorers.
Another adventurer has learned how endeavors succeed from experience and observation. The adventurer knows they will create something of intangible greatness by influencing a team of explorers. At times, the journey must pause. The team of explorers gathers to consider the map and decide how to proceed. These moments of collaboration and coordination are essential to the journey. The adventurer who only knows how to proceed alone will fall behind the adventurer who can rally a whole expedition crew. Thus, the adventurer does not directly produce the journey, but is essential nonetheless.
Thus, the team of explorers, when pulling together, goes much further than scrappy bands of individualistic explorers often pulling at odds with each other.
Previously, an iron rule of Aretha Franklin: she could sing anything slower and better than anyone else.
Update, a contender has entered the ring: Carole King performs “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman” pretty dang slowly. Which she wrote!
So I have to relax the iron rule here. That’s okay, I have another one.
New iron rule of Aretha Franklin: no one made ‘em sweat like Aretha. In part, because Aretha contractually insisted every room she played have the air conditioning turned off to protect her vocal cords.
About a VH-1 Divas television performance:
As producers laid out the run of show and began rehearsals at the Beacon Theater an electrician called in to work on the air conditioning accidentally flipped a switch and cold air began blowing down on the stage. Now, it was widely known at the time that Ms. Franklin had a clause in her contract that there was to be no AC during her performances and rehearsals as the cold air agitated her vocal chords and prevented her from giving her best performance. It wasn’t a matter of being high-maintenance; it was her professional commitment to giving her audience her best.
Next time you’re watching a live performance, look at how much Aretha, and everyone else in the room, is sweating. It’s not just the stage lights. She’s the queen for a reason!
A field guide to exploring rabbit holes
You’re deep in eldritch code, a product problem, or a cross-functional issue that is affecting your team. Hours have passed, and you feel like you’re only starting to get your bearings with the issue. Finding a solution, let alone considering its consequences, seems further hours away.
You’re down a rabbit hole. You need to explore a very open-ended concern, but you also need to maintain a bias toward action.
Don’t go without a time box or teammate. Set a time limit. Or, ask a colleague to keep you accountable. You want a constraining mechanism to pull you out of the hole if you get lost.
“Rubber duck” the issue before you start. Explain it out loud or write a summary in your notes. You may activate a different part of your brain and talk yourself out of the rabbit hole entirely.
Keep notes. Track every conceptual tunnel you explore. Note the dead-ends and red herrings. Show something for your effort, even if you don’t find what you were looking for.
Tell teammates what the rabbit hole is and why you think it’s necessary. Ideally, you can explain this in a sentence or two at most. Think about how long you think it’s worthwhile to go down that rabbit hole. Don’t spend more than that in the rabbit hole!
When you encounter black boxes, rabbit holes in rabbit holes, note them and keep moving. You’re already distracted by this rabbit hole, don’t get distracted from your distraction! Not all rabbit holes are worth exploring – some lead to deeper problems without payoff.
You never stop growing as a project leader.
Hurry up and flub your first fifty projects; the sooner you learn from stumbling, the better. Get a taste for all the technical and interpersonal ways a thing can go sideways. Grow past trying to use process to block all the ways projects have punched you in the face. Develop your sense for a project that is drifting off the golden path. Experiment with and develop your moves for bringing the project back.
Accept that people will always ask for estimates. Find peace in a way to provide them honestly. Help your team use estimates as planning and research without feeling like they’re setting themselves up for failure.
Most importantly, give your team the freedom to solve meaningful problems instead of grinding through a backlog of tasks and epics.
Perfection often manifests as procrastination. But, we imagine our work with more perfection and grandeur than we could hope to achieve in reality. By definition!
Something—our limited talents, our limited time, our limited control over events, and over the actions of other people—will always render our creation less than perfect. Dispiriting as this might sound at first, it contains a liberating message: if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.
— Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
Better to get a bit done today, no matter how small or imperfect. Over the days and weeks, what’s done will compound. That compounding effort yields a better idea of how to realize what you imagined, and opportunities to reach for the perfection or grandeur originally imagined. 📈