I Learnt

I was listening to the audiobook for "Questions Are the Answer" by Hal Gregerson and it mentioned an approach used by the X lab at Alphabet nicknamed "MonkeyFirst".

These are my notes from attending the Consensus 2019 conference in New York - there is a good chance that some of the notes I made are incorrect.

There is often a work culture that you should be busy all the time - if you are a programmer you should always be typing and producing code. Programming is a mental process and so requires thinking. Sometimes a little thought upfront saves a lot of pain and work down the line.

I really like Seth Godin's blog - I could easily link to his posts every day - however occasionally a post really stands out for me. A recent post called Bottlenecks had an interesting observation that was a different way of thinking about them.

This article uses a really neat analogy with Tetris for illustrating the impact of technical debt. Leaving gaps is akin to leaving technical debt in the code base and makes subsequent changes more difficult or slower to ship.

There is a natural reaction for people when faced with a problem to offer solutions. This can be especially true for managers.

When someone leaves a company there are two sides to it.

This excellent article looks at the different types of deadlines and the impact they have. The key point for me, and not something I had seen previously defined, is the distinction between real and artificial deadlines: