I ❤️ every time Sam goes on The Watch.

Alex Blumberg interviews Ira Glass.

Come for the Feynman anecdote, stay for the exploration of technology and culture.

A look behind the curtain with Nick Cave.

An improvisational approach.

Ryan Singer on the Product Love podcast talking about strategy, design, and outcomes.

A nice summary of the various parts in a typical web application.

Julie Zhuo:

Having all the answers is not the goal. Motivating the team to find the answers is the goal.

…

To evaluate the strength of a manager, look at the strength of their team.

…

The first time any of the above happens on your watch, it’s always new and hard, no matter how many books you’ve read on the topic. But the fifth or tenth time or 20th time it happens, you’re no longer freaked out. You realize that you’ll be fine.

Lots more interesting points in this and part 2.

A look at conflict in online communities and a suggestion on how to handle it.

Camille Fournier:

So what are the management skills that are needed to achieve [Engineering productivity]? At the first level of management, they look like:

1. Breaking down the scope of projects to help your team ship frequently. An eye for the MVP, for sequencing work and for predicting likely risks and bottlenecks for project completion are the skills here. This is why I think project management is such an important part of engineering leadership development, and why I hate to hand it off to professional project managers for work that doesn’t cross teams or organizations.

Bingo.

Phil Calçado:

In product development, the closer to the customer a piece of software is, the more often it changes.

Jeff Dickey:

In short: stdout is for output, stderr is for messaging.

Some good tips sprinkled throughout.

Nice coverage of different approaches for testing in Production.

Nephew James Stein of Los Angeles claimed his uncle was an A&R consultant for Bad Boy records and ran a chain of legal recreational marijuana dispensaries in Colorado called Casablunta.

Via Kottke.

Colm MacCárthaigh:

Now, let’s try a much better, O(1) control plane. DUMB AS ROCKS. Imagine if instead that the customer API pretty much edits a document directly, like a file on S3 or whatever. And imagine the servers just pull that file every few seconds, WHETHER IT CHANGED OR NOT.

This system is O(1). The whole config can change, or none of it, and the servers don’t even care. They are dumb. They just carry on. This is MUCH MUCH more robust. It never lags, it self-heals very quickly, and it’s always ready for a set of events like everyone changing everything at once. The SYSTEM DOES NOT CARE.