The Headline: “Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day.”
Reading Why We Sleep is super eye opening on the importance of sleep. We all know this, but reading it and letting it sink in this time was profound. Something I am making efforts to improve the latter half of this year.
Posts
Designing for Developer Experience (DevEx): Why It Matters — DevEx isn't about productivity metrics — it's about friction, and most platform teams are leaving a lot of value on the table by ignoring the small stuff.
Stop Calling It Loyalty — Expiring points and inbox spam aren't a loyalty program — they're a countdown timer, and brands keep wondering why customers don't stick around.
Clarity Is the Real Productivity Hack — Talented teams operating without a shared picture of what actually matters will always lose to average teams who know exactly where they're going.
What If You Started Every Day Already Caught Up? — I built an AI morning brief that synthesizes my calendar, Slack, Jira, GitHub, and more so I start every day already oriented instead of spending the first hour figuring out what's going on.
Books That Stuck
Curling Rocks — A funny, affectionate deep-dive into the sport of curling with plenty of inside stories and teaches a thing or two along the way.
AS1 — A hard sci-fi first-contact thriller grounded in real engineering. Described as a mix of Project Hail Mary and Arrival.
Do/ Curate — Another great addition to the Do collection. This book makes me want to throw a small intimate party at my house. Sweat the details.
Why We Sleep — Matthew Walker makes an airtight case that sleep isn't laziness — it's the single highest-leverage thing you can do for your brain and body.
Some Links
With the recent news about bluetooth sniffing devices and virtual lisence plate readers and how your public persona is under constant threat, Why Privacy Feels Impossible came across my reeder at the right time. Privacy feels impossible because most privacy advice skips the map. It gives you tools before it explains the layers those tools actually control.
Further reading from Ben Werdmuller asking some important questions. Is your personal data your property? What is personal data? Who Owns Your Data?
Is The Third Place Dead? the place where you go to get away from home and work – the First and Second Places. A blend of blurring lines between the first and second places with the third place may be to blame for the diminishing third place.
I’ve been doing a lot of interviewing, hiring discussions and team planning across the org lately and so naturally I’ve been thinking about what makes for a good team and a good interview.
I wrote about Interviewing, and how to be better at conducting them last month. Something people tend to miss is reading the energy in the room and selling the role as much as you are evaluating the person you are talking to.
I also read this little article warning to not stack weaknesses on a team. Managers tend to hire people like themselves and not pushing to hire for thier gaps.
Thinking about how to be the best interviewer I think a lot about being likeable and approachable - we’ve all had challenging people conduct out interviews, i dont want to be that. Jason Feifer posted about being likeable and the stories he presents are really helpful to be more intentional.
Of course, I’ve been doing plenty of reading about AI the last few months.
You Got Faster. Your Company Didn’t. We’re going faster by passing the slow part (the reading, the actual understanding) to whoever comes next. A Ponzi scheme?
AI being used by more people to replace search engines, and those search engines also defaulting to giving AI answers is an creasing worry of mine. If an LLM says it, it must be true, it has access to so much information. Well, in the UK AI answers are a new vector for election disinformation On average, 44.4% of responses were at least partially wrong;
Lastly, a great write up about the dangers and realistic look and plea for how we should approach AI in the future in Make AI Boring Again. The people who understand AI best are the ones best positioned to push it in better directions.
Life Lately
I was lucky enough to take a quick break in Salzburg, Munich and Milan in May before jumping head first back into work and second half of the year planning. The food, drinks and sights were amazing, although Milan was 94 degrees while we were there 🥵
Had a quick layover in Helsinki where we had the best Gin + Tonics weve ever had using the award winning rye based gin Kyro from Finland.
Curled in a quick summer league, its a long wait til fall.
Been spending a lot of time with the pupper as we start our busy summer schedule of friends, family and enjoying the amazing Chicago weather.
One Thing to Carry Forward
The pace of learning has been much faster with AI, but its important to use it as a tool not as a factual reference book.