Working Skillfully in Complexity (for VDDD)

For: [Virtual open Space] Systems Thinking and Skillful Interaction 20 September, 2023 Keynote by Jessica Kerr, jessitron.com These are my notes, publishing for people who were there (or anyone who wants to read them) Working Skillfully in Complexity Plan: about half on the technical side of sociotechnical systems, half on social. I can’t define what …

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Testing an OpenTelemetry Collector deployed as a Daemonset in Kubernetes

TL;DR: skip to this readme for the easiest path When you’re running applications in Kubernetes, and you’re using OpenTelemetry for observability, then one recommended practice is to run the OpenTelemetry Collector on each node in your cluster. Then each of your applications can send telemetry data (traces, metrics, logs) to that local collector. To run …

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A Developer’s Starting Point for Integrating with LLMs

Here’s what I know so far, from a lay-developer’s perspective (no AI or ML experience). So you’re a coder, and you’ve been asked to integrate with ChatGPT. What do you need to know? ChatGPT is an example of a Large Language Model (LLM). LLMs are a kind of machine learning (call it AI if you …

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No More Feedback (book summary)

We’re talking here about “feedback” as commentary from people you work with, telling you what you could do better—in particular, 360° Feedback as part of a performance review. I’ve capitalized “Feedback” in this post in reference to this particular use of the word. The benefits of Feedback are purely mythological. Carol Sanford, No More Feedback …

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Accountability for Effective Teams

Accountability is about performance and behavior. Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage Accountability for measurable outcomes is “not the most important kind.” It’s the easy kind. The kind [of accountability] that is more fundamental, important, and difficult is about behavior. Lencioni, The Advantage It’s fundamental because behavior is what we can legitimately ask someone to change. Business …

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Alignment gets expensive. Don’t skimp on it.

Honeycomb has doubled in size since I joined less than 2 years ago. More people means we can do more things at the same time. Both “more people” and “more things at the same time” lead to increased overhead. There’s coordination overhead to get timings right on work that’s independent. Like, to release a feature …

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