I learnt this week - 22nd April 2025

The links today including bucketing work time, competing on price, n+1 people, football tactics, engineering laws, building Git, (not) delighting customers, librarians, object storage, future of work, a new colour and tech hiring.

3 Buckets of Work Time

I like the simplicity of breaking work time into:

• conversations,
• doing the work and
• thinking about the work.

It is particularly easy to forget the last one when you are in meetings and focusing on delivery.

Sometimes never compete on price

How some companies became a success by competing on price. In each case it included a trade off that meant they went after a subset of the market and their weakness made them less likely to be copied.

Where is your N + 1?

At what number of people does something become stressful? Is it talking to 5 people, presenting to 100 or maybe somewhere in between?

Along similar lines, I’ve always wondered about the limit of sporting records. When someone breaks a record do they think they could have improved a miniscule amount to get a better time or a better distance?

In most cases there is probably a small change that could have improved it … but there must be some physical limit and what point is that?

Football tactics: Corner chicken & Rory Delap 2.0

I thought this was going to be some random ideas about football but there are actually some quite neat ideas in this. I’m not sure any top teams would actually try any of these but it would certainly make some games more interesting.

The 13 software engineering laws

A nice collection of software engineering “laws”. Most are pretty well known but good to have a refresh. I particularly like “Zawinski’s Law” as that was particularly relevant to one feature that is currently being talked about where I work.

Linus Torvalds built Git in 10 days

When you get on a roll when you are coding it is amazing what you can produce in a short time. Just to be clear, I am not comparing myself to Linus Torvalds - he is in a different league.

When I worked at a hedge fund I developed some functionality that allowed a set of processes that were consuming vast amounts of data to run in parallel and automatically determine which was the leader just through a few messages. This is common place now and there are lots of libraries/tools/platforms for doing this but this was written about 20 years ago - and I wrote most of it in one afternoon. It was probably the most productive few coding hours I have ever had.

Delighting customers is not difficult.

It does not take much to turn a bad customer experience into a good one and sometimes companies miss that opportunity. In this age of social media, something that could have been handled simply and easily has now been broadcast for all to see and will have a much larger impact on their business than just handling an issue at the time.

Librarians are dangerous.

This article brilliantly illustrates the impact a librarian can have on someone and what they do. It is written in a great tongue in cheek style, very funny in places.

I did a week of work experience in a library when I was at secondary school and then my first job was writing software that ran public libraries around Europe. However it is ages since I used a library and they are definitely less popular than they were in the past.

So you want to use Object Storage

An exercise in reducing tail latencies in cloud object storage. This incurs some additional costs but maybe useful if it makes some use cases feasible.

OpenAI, Windsurf, and the future of work

Could one of the new AI coding tools provide the basis for future workspaces, even for non-coding users? It is one of the theories behind talk that OpenAI might buy Windsurf.

Hue new? Scientists claim to have found colour no one has seen before

I am not sure I would want to shine lasers into my eyes just to see a type of turquoise no-one has seen before. What could go wrong?!

Tech hiring: is this an inflection point?

We are currently recruiting for three roles and have just found two new members of staff. The use of AI is definitely having an impact on the recruitment process. I have just created a technical test and as part of that I explained they can use AI to assist them but expect to be able to explain the code they have written and most importantly why they did it the way they did. We will see how well that works.