August is always a fast rollercoaster into the end of summer. Birthdays, work trips, planning and trying to enjoy the outdoors as much as possible before the cold Chicago winter comes in. The mosquitos have been the worst I’ve seen in years, which has made the outside time less enjoyable.

Posts

• Book Review: The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER

• July 2025 Review

• The AI We Were Promised

Books

• Becoming a Data Head: How to Think, Speak, and Understand Data Science, Statistics, and Machine Learning by Alex Gutman & Jordan Goldmeier

• I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pagrin - A fun dark thriller-ish book. A good break from the data, software stuff I’ve been reading.

• Product Driven: The Software Engineering Leadership Model for Product Thinking, Ownership, and Outcomes by Matt Watson - might write a review on this later, but its a pretty digestible book, written like a series of blog posts that covers complete topics. Many times through the book I felt like a bad engineering leader, and others I felt like I was nailing it.

Links

• You Have Too Many Metrics - The more You build out, the more metrics you accumulate. The less important some of these become, I’ve noticed this in teams I’ve lead. “The common failure, however, is to not discuss what good and bad actually looks like.”

• Why Engineers Hate Their Managers (And What to Do About It) - The punching bag from all angles. What does it look like to be a good manager to your engineers? How to know you are messing it up?

• METR's AI productivity study is really good - This has been sitting in my reeder for a couple months now, but 19% slower on average is a significant metric. They hype is blowing the bubble up, but there is room to make some of these tools be more effective for engineers.

• TBM 273: What To Do More (And Less) Of - Product-centric teams weave rich context into discussions to improve decision. Resist premature convergence and problem framing being precise.

• Coming Soon: Your Professional Decline - problem solving peaks early and then declines, wisdom from experiences grows into later life. High achievers like athletes struggle adjusting to life post-peak.

Other

• Playing around with Sentry Logs lately on my free account. I love a service that gives some of its most powerful features to hobbyists.

• A couple of metrics for the Month of August I am happy with: Had a 6.91 hour sleep average for the month, while also keeping screen time to 4.93 hours.

• Trying to take in the simple things, slow down and be less reactive lately. Took the dog on a walk where he was being kind of challenging but saw this butterfly swooping around a flower, so I got a shot of it.