Seemed like all the travel that I’ve done this year has crept into November (and December), with holidays, on-sites and a couple brief getaways. It’s also the time of year where all the companies that you share data with start showing you cute little stats about your behaviors. Due to all the travel and year end planning and reviews I havent really posted as much as I wanted to this month.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research on maker time, which is apparent in the links section. Optimizing, measuring and protecting time for the engineering team to get meaningful work done. I also blogged about it in The Dopamine of Done, too. This is an area I know can make good teams great.

On my laravel account, I see that I had a pretty productive year deploying to this blog and my side projects.

Posts

• October 2025 Review

• The Dopamine of Done

Books

• The Optimist by Keach Hagey - A biography of Sam Altman published this year. It was interesting to read this book like a historical figure but it really only began a few years ago. We’ll see what the next decade will say about Sam and AI. My two cents is we are seeing the beginning of the end for AI hype.

• Dead Wake by Erik Larson - What an incredible book, as with all Larson’s work. The stories woven so perfectly you can really feel the cheer and happiness as the Lusitania embarks and the air of unknown that the war is bringing to Britain. From the submarine, the logs tell a story that is cold and reads like a stat sheet. What an incredible book, my third from Larson.

Links

• Honor the Maker’s Schedule - “a culture where a manager can drop an event on your calendar at any time signals that they don’t really care about your experience or needs.” Ouch - need to be better at this.

• Makers time and collaboration time: two metrics that help teams improve the timing of meetings to increase team health and productivity - Managers like me are happy to break their day up into 30 minute slots. Makers on the other hand need large amounts of uninterrupted time (eg. 2-3 hours+) in order to solve a problem, get into a state of flow and do their best work

• What Actually Makes You Senior - This blog is perfectly written, I will probably be taking a lot from this in review season this year. “The one skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else isn’t technical. It’s the ability to take ambiguous problems and make them concrete.”

• How To Love Learning Again - Your relationship with learning is shaped by biological, psychological, and social factors that you can influence.

• The work is (often) people - It is easy to reduce our work to the obvious material outputs – the reports, prototypes, business cases, etc. – but the ultimate endeavour is first and foremost a means through which people try to understand and shape the world.

Other

• Went to a couple hockey games, watched many more. Enjoyed some curling matches on youtube, as well. Winter sports are the best!

• We enjoyed the beginning and end of a very short fall in Chicago. But the pup loved the first couple snow falls we’ve had this year.