July 2025 Review
By Tyler Jefford
August 5th, 2025
Like clockwork, got really busy and didn’t publish a lot in June. but im back now in July.
This month’s theme was primarily about organizing projects, collecting data and writing improvement docs for the team. It lead me in some interesting areas, finding old docs I’ve written, blog posts I’ve saved and books, new and old. I may write some about this in the future, but the main pillars of my management are still as relevant, being predictable and accountable.
Other than that, I have been hacking away at my side projects a bit more and exploring some new APIs to pull data in an automated way. Less things for me to click.
Posts
Books
A few AI books I’ve read recently
Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future by Reid Hoffman - I reviewed the book here
Co-Intelligence: The Definitive, Bestselling Guide to Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick
The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions by Geoff Woods
More Books
Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray
Loka by S.B. Divya - I wanted to like this series more. The pacing was just really slow.
The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER by Thomas Fisher - Amazing book, powerful stories from a Chicago ER on the south side during Covid and beyond. Like other books I’ve read, it's more about the structures enforced by policy vs the medical care given. Check out my review on this book.
Links
PAC – Personal Ambient Computing - I love these concepts of not-far-off technology. I’ve had a similar idea where your phone is the PAC and you plug it into your car, home or desk and the settings and services show up.
Prompt caching - OpenAI API - Digging into some performance improvements with my openAI API integration, I found this doc to be helpful in understanding the cache system.
Every service should have a killswitch - Kind of a no-brainer but often overlooked when building out a new system/code path.
The first big AI disaster is yet to happen - Another from Sean, thinking about how AI is continuing to be the wildwest, he talks about how we are pre-major disaster where AI is fully at fault.
Good Engineer/Bad Engineer - Bad engineers think their job is to write code. Good engineers know their job is to ship working software that adds real value to users.
Employees are imprisoned in an ‘infinite workday’ - Data from Microsoft shows workers are finding it harder to disconnect. And I can attest to that.
New advice for aspiring managers - I passed this one around a bit this month, some pretty solid advice for people getting into management, but also for folks who are feeling stagnant.
The New Surveillance State: Why Data Privacy Is Now Essential to Democracy - Data privacy was always essential to democracy, but now that democracy itself is in dire straits the need for strong protections are more obviously pressing.
3 Human Skills That Make You Irreplaceable in an AI World - great little article that focuses on some of the things that make humans better than robots.
GitHub’s internal playbook for building an AI-powered workforce - a long but interesting article on adopting AI in your workflow.
Other
I've been switching from Aspen back to Insomnia for my REST testing client. Insomnia offers a much fuller feature set and provides a smoother experience.
Dubai Chocolate has made its way from whatever popular place to my hands. Bought this one with cotton candy in it - i liked it a lot. how’d they get the cotton candy to be dry and melty in there?
