AI
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What do managers even do now?
→: What do managers even do now?I watched an IC have a lightbulb moment: they’re a manager now. Running agents in parallel, giving direction, deciding what’s worth doing. Being responsible for what ships, without doing it all themself. My job is giving them the pieces of management that are useful right now. Not how to run a 1:1. How to think…
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Skills for a more leveraged workflow
→: Skills for a more leveraged workflowI’ve been skeptical in general about sharing workflow skills. I have a bunch I share with direct collaborators, but there are a lot of “AI skills” repos out there and I’ve only found 2 of them really useful to me (#1, #2). I thought working out what you wanted and making your own was important…
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Maturing our development process as an AI-first 2 person team
→: Maturing our development process as an AI-first 2 person teamWe’re doing a big release this week for DRI Your Career. Mostly bug fixes and reliability work nobody will notice, but the two things worth mentioning: We’ve come a long way since it was just Jean and “Claude the intern”, but mostly very iteratively. We’d come to a point where it seemed worth rethinking. We…
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Self-promotion without the ick (thanks Claude)
→: Self-promotion without the ick (thanks Claude)To be brutally honest, this (making Claude my social media manager) all started because I felt inadequate about self-promotion. And being an engineer, my response to feeling bad about something is to ask what I can build and what data would make the feeling go away. So at the start of the year I built…
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The Value of Getting Closer to the Work
→: The Value of Getting Closer to the WorkScaling The core problem of scaling a team is that not everyone can know everything. Scaling is the work of systematizing that – so that things are understandable, knowable. It’s turning “tribal knowledge” into documentation, automation, and process. It used to be that only the automation was for the machine, but now documentation is machine…
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WordPress + Claude – a new look for cate.blog
→: WordPress + Claude – a new look for cate.blogIf you’re reading this on cate.blog, things look different. I’m pleased with how it came out. Getting there was more difficult than I expected. I came into this confident. I used to work on WordPress (admittedly, the mobile apps – but I did the support rotations and lived in P2 like everyone else). I have…
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Useful AI skills for Engineering Leaders
→: Useful AI skills for Engineering LeadersThe volume is up. More PRs, more pings, more incidents, more asks coming from more directions. I used to have 8 directs that dealt with most things, and organized and routed information to me for what I had to help them with, but since embarking on a new adventure, I’ve been rebuilding a different system…
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The Joy of Scope Creep
→: The Joy of Scope CreepI’m disciplined about scope. Ship the smallest thing that moves you forward. The feature you don’t build is the feature you don’t maintain. When I was running a team, holding the why was the job. Keeping us focused on the things that actually mattered, and away from the things that didn’t. In Navigating the AI…
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High Throughput, Low Completion
→: High Throughput, Low CompletionI have never been someone who organises things. I have a great memory and a high tolerance for ambiguity, and I evolved to match the era of the internet where searching things by keyword was sufficient. I documented, extensively. But I did not really organize. Not myself, nor – despite my job – other people.…