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Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family, by Jordan Mechner

Just fabulous. Maybe it's because his family history is not a world of different from mine, or maybe it's because his journey and interests feels intertwined with my own, but I wept openly as I read the final third of this. It's beautiful and heartbreaking; true and relevant; deeply resonant in the way Maus was a generation ago. I learned about myself as I read it; I can't recommend it enough.

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Over time I'm becoming more and more enamored with the Derek Sivers mindset to posting on the internet.

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One of the disappointments of my adult life has been realizing that I’m way to the left of a lot of people - that things I think are sensible improvements that we need in order to help people have better lives are often seen as out of touch and overly-ideological.

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With 'Cowboy Carter,' Black country music fans are front and center, at last

"In interviews with The 19th, a dozen Black fans of country discussed reconciling their love for the music with its racist, misogynistic past, as well as the pervasive image of White men who continue to dominate the mainstream industry. They are hopeful that Beyoncé and “Cowboy Carter,” released Friday, will help elevate Black country artists and serve as a bridge for more Black people to feel comfortable listening."

It's a superb album: musically and thematically breathtaking. Even if you might not ordinarily listen to Beyoncé (the "why" of which might be worth examining in itself), you really owe it to yourself to check it out.

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Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy: Lawsuit

"By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users' private message inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks.”"

This seems like it should be wildly illegal - collusion on user data to the point where a third party had access to users' private messages. I have to assume that this data was then used as part of Netflix's then-famous recommendation algorithm.

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Russell T. Davies on Why Doctor Who's Disney Partnership Is So Important

"You’ve also got to look at the long-term, at the end of the BBC, which somehow is surely undoubtedly on its way in some shape or form. What, is Doctor Who going to die then?"

This is a pretty clear-eyed quote from Russell T Davies. And there's more here, which is all about finding ways to tell these stories using whatever tools and vehicles and funding are available right now to do it.

Doctor Who is the best TV show ever made - and I'm grateful that he keeps finding ways to make it work.

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An intrusive thought about Trump 2024

What if the worst happens?

7 min read

A fragment of American flag

I come from families of forced migrants. On one side, my father’s earliest memories are of the unspeakable horrors he endured in a concentration camp in Indonesia. On the other, my great grandfather’s Ukrainian village was burned down by the White Army as part of a vicious pogrom.

The trauma of these events echoes through generations.

Although I intellectually know it to be true, it’s hard to imagine that these things happened to my family. I’m sitting on a sofa as I type this on my MacBook Pro; music is gently emanating from my Sonos. In about an hour, I’ll pick our son up from daycare and walk him home. He’ll probably ask for a banana as a snack. I’m thinking tonight might be a good night to order delivery food for dinner.

I’m lucky, of course: I’ve been fortunate in my life, so I have a house where I live comfortably with my family, and I’m also fortunate to not have been born in a place where I might be subjected to violence. I don’t live under authoritarian rule.

There’s nothing separating me from my dad’s experience but time; there’s nothing separating me from the experiences of people who do live under threat of authoritarian violence but chance. The walls of my comfortable safety are paper thin.

So.

I’ve got this thought about Donald Trump that I can’t get out of my head.

It goes like this:

Let’s say he wins in November. That in itself is not something I’m hoping for, but I’ve lived through four years of his Presidency before. His values are very far from my own, and I think he will cause great harm, but eventually those four years will be over and a cleanup can begin.

But let’s imagine, for a moment, that he follows through on the promises of Project 2025, an action plan produced by over 100 collaborators including the Heritage Foundation, Turning Point USA, and the Conservative Partnership Institute. Those include:

Project 2025 includes immediately invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement and directing the DOJ to pursue Trump adversaries. Project Director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, said in September 2023 that Project 2025 is "systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army, aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state."

And:

Reactions to the plan included variously describing it as authoritarian, an attempt by Trump to become a dictator, and a path leading the United States towards autocracy, with several experts in law criticizing it for violating current constitutional laws that would undermine the rule of law and the separation of powers.

And:

[…] forces would "go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids" who would then be taken to "large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas" to be held in internment camps prior to deportation. Trump has also spoken of rounding up homeless people in blue cities and detaining them in camps.

These ideas seem surreal; far-fetched; absurd. That can’t happen here, it’s easy to think to myself, from the sanctity of my Starbucks-and-Amazon bubble.

Just like it couldn’t have happened in Western Europe a hundred years ago. Just like there’s no way Madison Square Garden could ever have been filled to capacity with Nazis. (Incidentally, did you know Americans used to salute the flag with right arms stretched, palms out, Hitler-style, until the Second World War? I didn’t. And did you know that Hitler took his inspiration for the treatment of the Jews from Jim Crow America? Or that Oregon joined the Union as a literal white supremacist state?)

Look, I’m not saying this will happen. But it’s worth considering: what if it did? Concentration camps for undesirables; military enforcing authoritarian rule on the streets; political opponents imprisoned? It’s all right there in the plan, endorsed by some of the biggest names in conservative politics.

Some people welcome these plans, or don’t see them as a big deal. If that’s you, know that we can’t be friends, and I have no intention of letting you close to my child.

Some people will simply turn away and ignore it, because it doesn’t apply directly to them. Getting involved is too political. As the writer Naomi Shulman famously noted:

Nice people made the best Nazis.

Or so I have been told. My mother was born in Munich in 1934, and spent her childhood in Nazi Germany surrounded by nice people who refused to make waves. When things got ugly, the people my mother lived alongside chose not to focus on “politics,” instead busying themselves with happier things. They were lovely, kind people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away.

There are a lot of so-called “nice people” in waiting: people who want to keep their heads down, people who don’t want to become activists, people who want to support their country no matter what it does.

Everyone knows the famous Pastor Niemöller quote, but it bears repeating:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Of course, not everyone will be a collaborator, either through willful support or passive acquiescence.

There are the people who resist: the brave ones who stand up for something in the face of enormous opposition. My grandfather led the resistance against the Japanese in Indonesia; other members of my family were members of the resistance against the Nazis in Europe. I can’t imagine the bravery that this entailed; the sacrifices that needed to be made. Hollywood tales of the resistance are often sanitized to be palatable as entertainment: the actual reality of the history is far more horrific.

Or there are the people who simply leave. Not everyone can; infamously, America turned away scores of Jews who were hoping to seek refuge from the Nazis, and success is dependent on visas, a certain amount of wealth, and luck. But if you’re able to leave, it might well be the right thing to do. No amount of loyalty to a country or desire to stick the boot into an authoritarian regime is worth risking the lives and well-being of your children. There is no shame, in the face of this kind of dark turn, in getting the fuck out.

So, that’s my thought.

My thought is that the worst is perfectly possible.

And if the worst happens, I do not want to acquiesce, and I do not want to be associated with people who do.

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Yes: A writing-focused Homebrew Website Club is completely up my street and I'm excited to attend!

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Advertising share intents with microformats

1 min read

Yesterday I published a fediverse-aware / indieweb-aware version of a "share to..." / AddThis-like tool. It allows you to easily add a “share to ..” button to your website that works with as many social platforms as possible, and attempts to use whatever share intent a platform might have available.

One of the things it does is look for HTML header metadata like <link rel="share-url" href="https://werd.io/share/?text={text}"> in order to figure out how to share to a given platform.

It was a first draft, and I'd like to socialize that idea — what should it look like to advertise a share intent on a platform using microformats?

There was an attempt over a decade ago called OExchange, which used data stored in .well-known. I'm okay with supporting it, but it never took off, and I feel like something simpler would be more effective.

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Share Openly

You know all those “share to Facebook” / “share to Twitter” links you see all over peoples’ websites? They’re all out of date.

Social media has evolved over the last year, yet nobody has “share to” links for Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, etc. There have been a few attempts to create “share to Mastodon” buttons, but they haven’t taken the larger breadth of the new social media landscape into account.

So I’ve built a prototype, which I’ve called ShareOpenly.

At the bottom of every article on my site, you’ll see a “share to social media” button. Here’s the button for this article.

If you click it, you’ll be taken to a page that looks like this one:

Share Openly share screen

You can select one of the pre-set sites in the list, and you’ll be taken to share a post there. For example, if I click on Threads, it will take me to share there:

But if you, for example, have a Mastodon instance, or a Known site, or an indieweb site at a different domain, you can enter that domain in the box, and ShareOpenly will try and find a way to let you share the page with that site.

ShareOpenly will do a few things first:

  1. If it’s on a “well-known” domain — eg, facebook.com — it’ll send you to the share page there.
  2. It checks to see if it can figure out if the site is on a known platform (currently Mastodon, Known, hosted WordPress, micro.blog, and a few others). If so — hooray! — it knows the share URL, and off you go.
  3. It looks for a <link rel=“share-url”> header tag on the page. The href attribute should be set to the share URL for the site, with template variables {text} and (optionally) {url} present where the share text and URL should go. (If {url} is not present, the URL to share will be appended at the end of the text.) If it’s there — yay! — we forward there, replacing {text} and {url} as appropriate.

Once you’ve shared to a site, the next time you visit ShareOpenly, it will be in the quick links. For example, I shared to my site at werd.io in the example above, and now here it is in the links:

It’s early days yet — this is just a prototype — but I thought I’d share what I’ve built so far.

If you want to add ShareOpenly to your own site, please do! Just replace the URL and test in this link - https://shareopenly.org/share/?url=url&text=text - with your own. You can also just visit the ShareOpenly homepage to share a site directly.

 

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The Deaths of Effective Altruism

"This is a stranger story of how some small-time philosophers captured some big-bet billionaires, who in turn captured the philosophers—and how the two groups spun themselves into an opulent vortex that has sucked up thousands of bright minds worldwide."

This jumped out to me:

"If you’re earning-to-give, you should maximize your wealth. And if you think each moment should be optimized for profit, you’ll never choose to spend resources on boring grown-up things like auditors and a chief financial officer. For SBF, good-for-me-now and good-for-everyone-always started to merge into one."

It's absolutely bankrupt thinking - and at the same time, absolutely rife. This isn't how we make the world better for everyone. But plenty of people have tricked themselves (and/or the people around them) into thinking it is.

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Facebook and X gave up on news. LinkedIn wants to fill the void

"All of this has led to some pretty serious soul-searching among America’s journalists. Is the future email newsletters? Will podcasts save the news? Does everything need to be short vertical video now? Well, here’s a question that it might be time to start asking: What about LinkedIn?"

More evidence sits below:

"According to a Pew survey released last November, a little under a quarter of LinkedIn users say they get their news on the site. According to that same survey, LinkedIn news consumers are fairly evenly split between men and women, are overwhelmingly liberal, and almost 70% of them are under 49. So even though the platform may feel like an artifact from a different era of the web, where social networks functioned primarily as directories of personal contacts, that does appear to be changing."

I don't particularly like it, but I understand why LinkedIn might be a good partial solution. My eggs remain in the decentralized social web basket: I think the Fediverse remains the ecosystem with the best possible outcomes for publishers, both in terms of potential audience and how publishers can own their relationships with their communities.

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How I use screens

3 min read

Hey, it's an iMac

Nathan Schneider writes about how he uses screens:

The underlying idea for me is that I like to keep a clear desk. In my office, for instance, I keep the desk where I meet with students empty, except for a few intentional symbolic objects on the side. I do this to express to students that they have my complete attention—and to help me give that attention. During the meeting, we might put things on the desk as we discuss them. But at the end, I make sure those things are gone so the desk is clear for the next student.

I aspire to this but fall short.

There are some things here that I do practice:

  • I close my tabs: not just at the end of the day, but several times during it. I don’t like having a bunch of open tabs that begin to feel like an inbox.
  • I try to get to inbox zero (in my work email) every day.
  • Nathan doesn’t mention this, but I regularly clear my feed reader, so that I’m starting from fresh and don’t feel like I have an endless backlog of posts to read.
  • I use virtual desktops with a single task per desktop, usually in full-screen mode.
  • Notifications for almost everything are off 24/7.
  • I like to shut down my computer for the night.

While I have an external monitor on my desk, I’ve realized that it’s far too big for my needs. It’s great for video calls — which is, for better or worse, how I spend a lot of my workday — but lousy for actually getting work done. There’s something about the overwhelm of it, as if I’m trying to write on an IMAX. I’ve long favored 13” laptops (although my main personal computer is a Mac Mini these days), and there’s something about the small screen that I find helps me to focus. Maybe it’s just habit.

I do take my phone to bed (it charges with my watch on a wireless pad on my nightstand) and I should find a better place for it. I theoretically need an alarm clock to replace it, but the truth is that these days I have a human alarm clock who wakes me up far earlier than my phone ever does. And he always reaches for my phone, which I don’t think is particularly healthy. So perhaps I should just bite the bullet and charge my devices in my office overnight. The only thing that really gives me pause about changing — and this is silly — is that I’ve been loving playing Connections, Wordle, and the Daily Mini in bed before I go to sleep. But, come on, better sleep hygiene is worth it.

I appreciated Nathan’s list; lots to think about. What’s your routine?

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Lawsuit filed by Elon Musk's X against CCDH thrown out by judge

"A federal judge in California dismissed a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X against the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, writing in a judgement Monday that the “case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.”"

Irony alert!

This was always going to happen: Musk's complaint sat on shaky ground, and the man himself is a hypocrite who says he believes in free speech but is seeking to squash speech he doesn't like at every turn.

My questions are about his other companies. He's shown his true colors through the Twitter acquisition; at what point do stakeholders at SpaceX and Tesla say enough is enough?

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Pedal coast-to-coast without using a road? New program helps connect trails across the US

This is completely lovely and the kind of thing America absolutely should be doing.

"O’Neil hopes the trail born from eastern Indiana’s old railroad tracks will eventually become a central cog in the proposed Great American Rail-Trail — a continuous network of walking and biking routes spanning from Washington state to Washington, D.C."

Yes, please!

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Elon Musk, X Fought Surveillance While Profiting Off Surveillance

"While it was unclear whether, under Musk, X would continue leasing access to its users to Dataminr — and by extension, the government — the emails from the Secret Service confirm that, as of last summer, the social media platform was still very much in the government surveillance business."

The hypocrisy shouldn't be particularly surprising, of course. And we have to assume that something similar is happening with every centralized system. But there is an undeniably rich irony in the gap between what Musk says and what he does.

"Privacy advocates told The Intercept that X’s Musk-era warnings of government surveillance abuses are contradictory to the company’s continued sale of user data for the purpose of government surveillance."

Quite.

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What if everyone knew how much we all made?

1 min read

A clothing factory in China

Proposal: every product vendor must disclose the wages of the people who made it.

If you buy a box of chocolate, you get to know how much the people who picked the raw ingredients made, as well as the chocolatiers downstream from them, and so on.

If you buy an iPhone, you get to know how much the people who assembled it make, as well as the people who mined the lithium in the batteries, and the designers and engineers.

If you stream a song on Spotify, you get to know how much goes to the rights-holders. At the rights-holder end, you get to know how much goes to the performing artist, the songwriter, the engineers, the musicians, and so on.

If you buy a newspaper, you get to know how much the journalists, the printers, and the administrative staff make.

And so on and so on.

What if all wages were transparent?

 

Photo by Michael Chu, released under a CC license.

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Gawking at Thom Yorke

1 min read

Thom Yorke in 2012

Walking around Oxford, my hometown, I used to see Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke from time to time. He always looked miserable.

At Boots the Chemist? Miserable.

At the Ashmolean Museum? Miserable.

Having a picnic with his family? Miserable.

Walking down North Parade? Miserable.

It was only years later that I realized he was miserable because I was looking at him, and there must have been hundreds of other people who were doing the same.

Thom Yorke wasn’t the problem. I was the problem.

Sorry, Thom Yorke.

 

Photo by Jen S, released under a CC license.

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Blog aspirationally, not opportunistically

1 min read

When you find yourself writing a 3000 word essay about engineering management on your personal website, you might want to take a step back and take another look at your goals.

And if you find that this isn’t quite what you want to be talking or writing about, it maybe might be time take some more risks.

I mean, I stand by everything in the post. And on one level it’s important.

But also: let’s go make things and have fun and be creative and let go of our inhibitions a bit.

Perhaps write about hopes and dreams rather than work and administration.

Less business. More human.

Let’s go.

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Building engineering

Software developers

I’ve spent most of my career — now well over two decades of it — building things on the web. I’ve worked as a software developer, I’ve founded a couple of my own companies, and I’ve often found myself leading teams of engineers. Right now I’m the director for both engineering and IT (although there are teams of people who write code who aren’t under my wing — newsrooms are complicated).

Over time, a lot of my work seems to have become less about “what shall we build?” or “how shall we build it?”. Those questions are always vitally important, but there are prerequisites that sometimes need to take center stage: things like “what are we here to do?”, “how should we work together?”, and “how do we think about what matters?”

I’ve been sharpening my thinking about the necessary conditions to do good work, and how to achieve them. Here’s a window into how I’m thinking about these ideas across three dimensions: Organizational Context, Team Leadership, and Technology Trends.

Words painted on the street: passion led us here

Organizational Context

There’s an unattributed but often-quoted management strategy cliché that says: culture eats strategy for breakfast. I’m a believer. Culture contains the fundamental building blocks of how an organization acts as a community: its values, beliefs, attitudes, norms, processes, and rules. Without a strong one, you cannot succeed — regardless of what your strategy looks like. Conversely, a great strategy, by definition, is one that incorporates building a great, intentional culture. Without one, your team is more likely to burn out and leave, you’re much less likely to build something high-quality, and you’re unlikely to foster new ideas.

Software engineering, at least in the places I’ve practiced it, is all about innovation. The focus is rarely on maintaining the present, although some degree of maintenance is always necessary. Instead, it’s about building the future: figuring out what we’ll need our platform to look like in two to five years and finding ways to get there. It’s a creative pursuit as much as it is about rigor and craft, and it’s about values and taste as much as it is about business necessity.

This dynamic is well-served by some organizational cultures and actively undermined by others. The trick is figuring out which you’re in, and finding ways to either embrace the former or build a buffer zone for the latter.

One popular way of looking at organizational culture is the Competing Values Framework, which defines four distinct overall culture types — all four of which are usually present to different degrees inside an organization.

  • Adhocracy: an organic, unbureaucratic way of organizing work that challenges the status quo, formal titles, and hierarchy in favor of a focus on risk-taking and innovating at speed.
  • Clan: a family-like culture that, again, is relatively unbureaucratic, without much structure, where rules tend to manifest as social norms rather than edicts or rigid process.
  • Hierarchy: where an emphasis is placed on top-down control from upper management in order to create predictability and lower risk. Roles are clearly defined, rules are codified, and even internal communication tends to be stratified.
  • Market: a culture optimized around competition, both with competitors and internally. Measurable results are central, but the workplace can easily become toxic because everyone is trying to better themselves vs their peers.

Like many frameworks, the reality is not actually as cut and dry as this. Instead, I think these categories are best thought of as facets of an organizational culture. In some organizations, hierarchy and market focus may have a heavier emphasis; in others, innovation and collaboration.

I vastly prefer working within organizations that look like the first two environments — adhocracies and clans — and I’d hazard to say that almost every single engineer, designer, and product manager I’ve ever worked with feels the same way. Hierarchical systems are inherently creatively stifling: innovation can’t take place in an environment with predominantly top-down control. The same goes for hyper-competitive environments: while the competition might be motivating for some in the short term, it’s really hard to collaborate effectively and build on each others’ ideas if everyone is trying to get ahead of each other.

Hierarchies in particular definitionally strip your authority in favor of top-down direction, forcing you to negotiate through layers of politics to make any kind of change. Most good engineers are collaborators, not cogs, with ideas, expertise, and creativity that should be embraced. But hierarchy demands cog-like behavior, and creates institutional fiefdoms that tend towards bureaucracy, inhibiting any really new work from being done if it hasn’t been rubber-stamped. These aren’t great places for a creative person to work.

As Robin Rendle put it recently:

This is the most obvious thing to say in the world, but: the hard work should never be the bureaucracy, it should be designing things and solving technical problems. If the hard work ain’t the hard work, ya gotta bounce. Don’t kill yourself trying to tell people that.

That isn’t to say that every team in an organization should work the same way or strive for the same culture. It might be that a legal, compliance, or safety team needs to work in a more rigid way as a system of control, or that a sales team needs to be intensely market-oriented. Or those things might not be true at all! My point is that it’s a mistake for engineers to assume that because they work best in a particular kind of environment, everyone should work that way. Every organization is comprised of a mix of culture types, and every team needs to work in a way that allows them to do their best work.

This may seem obvious, but we often talk about a single team’s working style setting the cultural norms for a whole organization. For example, it’s common for an organization to be described as engineering-led or sales-led. To be clear, this is a false choice: there should simply be people-led organizations that are inclusive of different interdisciplinary needs and styles of working.

For that to be a reality, top-level leadership in particular needs to acknowledge that not every team works the same way. For my purposes, this means acknowledging that engineering needs a particular kind of culture in order to thrive (and is important enough to have its own culture and be deserving of autonomy).

A prerequisite to this is understanding the potential for a technology team (or any team) in the first place. That’s less likely to happen in organizations where it’s treated as back-office, paint-by-numbers work. If an organization can’t see the importance of a team’s work, and if it inherently does not respect the effort and expertise inherent in those roles, it’s going to be very difficult for them to do good work.

My bias is to lean heavily on storytelling and listening as tools for fostering understanding: finding ways to explain why the work of product and engineering is important in the context of the whole organization, and how that expertise can be leveraged in order to benefit everybody. It’s okay to not understand what an engineering team has the potential to do from the outset, but if organizational leaders continue to not understand, that’s on me. The way to get there is through being transparent about what we’re doing, how we’re thinking, and which challenges we expect to encounter.

It really matters. Mutual understanding begets mutual respect.

There needs to be an explicit understanding between teams, mutual respect between parties that encompasses their expertise and different ways of working, and loose protocols for how everyone is going to communicate with each other that is compatible with their different styles of working.

I shouldn’t presume to tell a team from another discipline what they need to do their job, just as they shouldn’t presume to tell me. I should treat another team as the expert in its discipline, and they should treat my team as the expert in mine.

Throughout all this and despite our differences, we’re all in the same boat. We need to all be pulling in the same direction, motivated around a single, motivating mission (why we’re all here), vision (what is the world we’re here to try to create), and strategy (what are we going to try and do next to make it a reality).

The role of upper management is to set the direction, foster a culture that supports everyone, and help to build those protocols (all while not running out of money). One role of team leaders is to navigate those protocols and act as a buffer where there is friction.

Silhouettes of people walking down a hill. One is in front

Team Leadership

Vulnerable, open leaders make it safe for everyone to take risks and show up to work as they are.

So far I’ve written a lot about how engineering teams need organizational support that starts with a compatible culture that is founded on respect. But even in an environment that is un-hierarchical, transparent, informal, respectful, and open, with clear organizational goals and a defining mission, there’s more work to be done in order to create an environment where engineers can do their best work.

As I wrote last year:

The truth is that while some of the tools of the trade are drawn from math and discrete logic, software is fundamentally a people business, and the only way to succeed is to build teams based on great, collaborative communication, human empathy, true support, and mutual respect.

Leaders need to be stewards of those values. I believe — strongly — that this is best achieved through servant leadership:

[Servant leadership] aims to foster an inclusive environment that enables everyone in the organization to thrive as their authentic self. Whereas traditional leadership focuses on the success of the company or organization, servant leadership puts employees first to grow the organization through their commitment and engagement. When implemented correctly, servant leadership can help foster trust, accountability, growth, and inclusion in the workplace.

Each of these are important; I would also add safety. A blame-free environment where everyone can speak openly, be themselves, make mistakes, and not feel like they have to put on a mask to work is one where people can take risks and therefore innovate more effectively.

When you’re facilitating a brainstorming exercise, you might intentionally throw in a few out-there suggestions to make participants feel comfortable to take risks with their own contributions. Similarly, one of the roles of a leader is to push the envelope, and maybe risk looking a bit silly, in order to allow other people to feel more comfortable taking risks with their work — and when they do, to cheerlead them, support them, and help them feel comfortable even if their ideas don’t work out.

In a hierarchical team, the leader might ask if team members are adhering to their standards. In a supportive team, the leader might primarily ask how they are doing at supporting their team. It’s not that you don’t ever ask if someone isn’t performing; it’s more to do with the center of gravity of assessment. Supportive teams put the employees first.

Fostering that sort of team culture heavily depends on how a manager shows up day to day. A manager who isn’t vulnerable, doesn’t reveal much of themselves, and requires homogeneity is — probably unintentionally — fostering a hierarchical culture where masking is the norm rather than a supportive one where people are free to to be themselves.

The same sorts of fractal dynamics that affect inter-team collaboration apply to inter-personal collaboration, too. Everyone is different and has different working and communication styles, and homogeneity should never be the goal.

You can tell a lot by a team’s approach to feedback. If it is given in one direction — from managers down — then you likely have a hierarchical culture where team members may be less able to speak up and share their ideas. (The same is true if feedback is sometimes given to managers but rarely acted on.) I’ve observed that the most successful teams have clear, open, 360-degree feedback loops, where everyone’s feedback is directly sought out and incorporated — from team members to managers, between team members, and from manager to manager.

Another observable difference in team cultures can be seen through the kinds of norms that are enforced. To the extent that there are hard and fast rules on a team, they should be grounded in a purpose that supports forward motion, rather than to provide comfort to leadership or simply to enforce sameness.

As illustration, here are two contrasting examples of norms I’ve often seen enforced on teams:

  • Source code is written to adhere to common style guidelines, and is peer reviewed.
  • Cameras should be turned on during video calls.

Common coding style rules are a social contract that lower the cognitive load of working with code that someone else on the team has written, removing important roadblocks to everyone’s work; peer review is a really great channel for feedback, learning, and preventing bugs. Meanwhile, enforcing that cameras should always be on during video calls only serves to make some people less comfortable on the call.

Ultimately, success here is measured in what you ship, how happy your team is, whether they recommend working at your organization to their friends, and how long people stick around for.

A robot and a person holding hands

Technology Trends

It’s important for an engineering team to not just have a competence in working with technology but to have strong opinions about it, its implications, and how it intersects with the lives of the people it touches. They should strive to be experts in those issues, learning as much as they can from relevant publications, scholars, and practitioners.

It would be ludicrous to examine the use of AI but not study its ethical issues. Not only is there a moral hazard in not understanding the subject holistically, but by leaving out topics like bias, intellectual property violations, and hallucinations as you investigate bringing AI into your work, you actually create liability for your organization. It’s both an ethical duty and good due diligence.

Similarly, imagine studying blockchain a few years ago but not covering its environmental impact or its potential for use in money laundering. Leadership might have been excited by the potential for financial growth, but by not examining the human impacts of the technology, you would have missed substantial risks that might have created real business headwinds later on.

Or imagine relying on developing code as a core function of your organization and not staying on top of new techniques, approaches, exploits, and technologies to build with. Your team would effectively be stuck in time without any real way to progress and stay relevant, creating a risk that your product would suffer over time.

Or, come to that, imagine working in a fast-moving field like technology and not forming a strong, informed opinion about how it will change that is rooted in learning, experimentation, and active collaboration with experts and other organizations.

This is another area where an open, collaborative, inclusive culture can be helpful. Giving space to team members who want to share their knowledge and ideas about a subject, and entrusting them to cover it from their perspective, helps allow for topics to be covered through the lens of a variety of diverse lived experiences. But by practicing and championing the idea of inclusion as a core team value, you encourage team members to actively go and speak to diverse experts and gather a variety of viewpoints. The gene pool of ideas is widened as you investigate a subject and your own ideas and resulting products and strategies will be stronger as a result.

In a hierarchical culture where strategy is set from the top down, this kind of broad, inclusive learning might not be as effective, or it might not be present at all. Servant leadership helps ensure that everyone has the space to learn and grow with respect to topics they may not have mastered yet, or that their perspectives are championed. You simply have access to fewer ideas from fewer perspectives, and you’re wildly limited as a result.

Those same open feedback channels that create well-functioning, communicative teams can also serve as a way for team members to learn from each other. The principles of openness, inclusion, respect, openness to risk, and collaboration can serve as guiding lights as teams navigate new technologies and help their respective organizations get to grips with these topics. Leaders have a role in fostering learning and knowledge-sharing on a team, and ensuring that it is a first-class activity alongside writing and architecting code.

Stenciled letters on a wall: Live, Work, Create.

Overall

A lot of the things that are important to get right with engineering aren’t really about engineering at all. The best teams have a robust, intentional culture that champions openness, inclusivity, and continuous learning — which requires a lot of relationship-building both internally and with the organization in which it sits. These teams can make progress on meaningful work, and make their members valued, heard, and empowered to contribute.

At a team leadership level, servant leadership is a vital part of fostering a culture of innovation and adaptability. By prioritizing the well-being and development of the people on their teams, leaders are making an investment that leads to higher performance, more nuanced strategy, more resilience, and lower churn.

At an organizational leadership level, a clear strategic direction and a focus on inclusivity help to provide the leeway to get this work done. I don’t know if you can succeed without those things; I certainly know that you can’t create a satisfying place for engineers and other creative people to work.

The most interesting and successful organizations have an externally-focused human mission and an internal focus on treating their humans well. That’s the only way to build technology well: to empower the people who are doing it, with a focus on empathy and inclusion, and a mission that galvanizes its community to work together. And, perhaps most importantly to me, that’s the only way to build a team that I want to work on.

That’s how I’ve been thinking about it. I’d love to read your reflections and to learn from you.

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Threads has entered the fediverse

"We’re taking a phased approach to Threads’ fediverse integration to ensure we can continue to build responsibly and get valuable feedback from our users and the fediverse community."

It's really great to see Meta do this and communicate well about it. However you see the company, it's a big step for one of the tech giants to embrace the open social web in this way.

In the future, this is how every new social platform will be built - so take note both on the detail and of their overall approach.

[Link]

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Big Journalism’s hopeless myopia

"One way you know that it’s business as usual for journalists is that so many have remained on Twitter, a platform whose owner has taken right-wing trollery to extremes lately. He loudly supports people who want to install a fascist government in the United States, and it’s clear enough that he would support fascism if and when it arrives."

"[...] If fascism arrives, a lot of these journalists will be fine. After all, they’re helping to create the conditions for a new Trump presidency. But a lot more will not be fine — and even the ones that are in favor under a Trump government will eventually realize that their safety and livelihoods are at the whim of the extreme right-wing cultists who’ll be in control."

[Link]

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The Intercept charts a new legal strategy for digital publishers suing OpenAI

A detail I hadn't noticed: while the New York Times OpenAI lawsuit rested on copyright infringement, the Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet are claiming a DMCA violation.

"A study released this month by Patronus AI, a startup launched by former Meta researchers, found that GPT-4 reproduced copyrighted content at the highest rate among popular LLMs. When asked to finish a passage of a copyrighted novel, GPT-4 reproduced the text verbatim 60% of the time. The new lawsuits similarly allege that ChatGPT reproduces journalistic works near-verbatim when prompted."

[Link]

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AI Is Threatening My Tech and Lifestyle Content Mill

"Sure, our articles maintain a rigid SEO template that creatively resembles the kitchen at a poorly run Quiznos, and granted, all our story ideas are gleaned from better-written magazine articles from seven months ago (that we’re totally not plagiarizing), but imagine if AI wrote those articles? So much would be lost."

Touché.

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Building vs using the web

2 min read

One thing that becomes clear when you move outside of open web groups and a certain kind of tech company is the difference between trying to build the web as a platform and trying to use the web as a platform.

In the former mental model, you’re experimenting to try and figure out how to push the envelope on a common platform. What doesn’t exist yet on the web that would be cool or useful? How can we preserve its openness and decentralization? How can the commons be richer for everyone? It’s ultimately an ideological endeavor: the web is great and we should keep building it in everyone’s interest, whether through protocols and extensions or through amazing public interest sites.

In the latter, you’re taking what exists and figuring out how to get the most use out of it. How can we harness this? Which web capabilities allow us to meet our goals more easily? Where are the opportunities? It’s not in any way an ideological endeavor: instead, it’s a pragmatic one. It’s business. You’re taking a resource and getting the most use out of it that you can.

Of course, it happens to be the case that the public resource continues to exist and is vibrant because of the first group of people I described. But it’s also okay to just use the web. The web is for everyone.

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