American Christmas, part 2Stores that are open on Sunday, and don’t close until 9pm. People saying “sorry” for no reason. Bagels. Top sheets. Ceiling fans. HVAC. Warmth from the sun. Massive amounts of water in toilets. Bottle caps that come all the way off. Colby jack. Cheddar. Ritz crackers. Crushed ice from your home refrigerator. Oceans of lotions: ten versions of every product (sometime more than ten). 45mph. Self-service checkout machines that insist in weighing every grocery.

We throw around the term “waste” a lot in software. It’s been around since the 2000s, at least since the Poppendieck’s book Lean Software Development. DevOps really took it and ran with it, it was renamed “toil” in SRE, and now the concept is pretty solidly part of how we think of software. Italked with Steve Pereira on what “waste” means exactly. We talked about value stream maps as well, another concept that’s so common that we don’t define it much anymore.

Only In AmericanStill warm tortillas. Adults wearing joke t-shirts. Yoga pants. Free packets of ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise. Ice with every drink. 75 mph. Stern TSA. Little plastic shopping bags. No GDPR pop-ups. 20% tips before checkout. Donuts. Right turn on red. Ice machine in fridge. Very big bowls. Eggs in the fridge California wine. Closed blinds. Toilet next to bathtub/shower combo. Formal dining room. Formal living room. The soothing hum of lawnmowers in the distance.

The discussion below was fun: we starting talking about alignment ambiguity in Dungeons and Dragons, then went to the role of tech debt in large organizations, and threw in some “this meeting could have been an email” like thinking at the end. Check it out! WastebookI’m super busy right now. I’ve got a lot of stuff to not be doing. Alternate: I’ve got stuff to not be doing, I’m kind of busy right now.

I really liked my co-worker Paul Kelly’s post on this topic, plus some anti-patterns. So I made the video above! You may recall him from a discussion with Cora and me a few months back as well. Even if you don’t deign to watch my silly shit above, you should check out his post. Relative to your interestsIs the Texas boom town of Austin losing its luster? - “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.

I've played solo D&D with ChatGPT for three months. It's not that great at the pure mechanics (for example, combat), but it has some great uses. This video is a little screwed up, but the audio is fine, and the content is even better...if I don't say so myself! Relative to your interestsCoincidently for me, there’s been a few things on remote work versus return to office. Gartner Outlines Three Ways Organizations Can Successfully Motivate Employees Back Into the Office - Summary: prove that it’s more productive to be in the office than working online.

The Business Bullshit DictionaryI’m recording a few tiny videos defining some business-world jargon. “Input,” “outcome oriented,” “politics,” and, here, “bureaucracy.” Once you’ve been in the corporate world for a few years, you stop noticing these words and a few years later, you stop taking them seriously, or at least, in a nuanced way. They’re just part of the noise of the cube-farm. But, if you pay attention to them, they’re often signals that are telling you either to beware or pointing to a problem that can be fixed.

What every kid wants, the Windows XP wallpaper.What’s your favorite “observed statistical regularity”?The “problem” with Goodhart’s Law is that we now know it exists. By “problem,” I mean using Goodhart’s Law when it comes to critiquing organizational metrics. If you know Goodhart’s Law (rather, the rewording of it as we’ll see below), when you’re making metrics, you change them and adapt them over time before they get gamed. When criticizing metrics (or anything, really) you should first assume that the people making them and using them are smart and trying their best…and know how to search the Internet.

There’s a lot going at work now, employee wise. If you’re using a VMware email address to subscribe to this (there’s several handfuls of people who are), I’d suggest switching it over to a personal email address. BEST OF LUCK TO US ALL. Meanwhile: Wastebook“Never ask me how I paid” is my version of “never tell me the odds.” “Alfur, that was brilliant!” Alfur: “The important thing is: it worked!”

Let’s get to it Found in a stack of my son’s old school papers.WastebookIf it's bad to yuk someone's yum, I suppose it's equally rude to yum someone's yuk. When I see a title that reads “Towards a…” I often think “cool story. Call me back when you get there.” I’ve listened to much worse in my playlists for years, so, you know: two thumbs up…? “Every now and then, I think about the fact that Karl Lagerfeld owned over 300 iPods.