Hello and welcome to our September issue of Aspeeria Peers.

I hope we’re welcoming the ‘-ber months’ with a calmer and more positive outlook toward the end of the year. In any case, I’m sharing feel-good articles that you can use for your career and life, as a whole.

Inside:

This Week’s Must-Reads

Industry News

Free Webinars For You

This week’s must-reads

Life Isn’t an Optimization Problem 

– Yew Jin Lim

tl;dr: “Most people approach major life decisions with a hidden assumption: somewhere out there is a single correct answer, and their job is to find it. The right career. The right city. The right partner. The right next move. Here’s what changes everything: there isn’t one right path. The truth is simpler and more freeing: you’re not the same person even moment to moment, so you’re always adjusting. What satisfies you at 30 isn’t what satisfies you at 45.”

Great Teams Start with Great Leaders

– Mary Iqbal

tl:dr: “Again and again, participants describe leaders who trusted the team, removed obstacles, asked good questions, and created space for people to do their best work. It makes me think that great teams really do start with great leadership.

Scrum teams are self-managing. But that doesn't mean that we don't need managers and leaders. We just need them to lead a bit differently than they do for simple work. That's why the leaders who get praised most often in those “great team” stories are the ones who empower rather than direct. Great leaders create clarity around purpose and outcomes so the team knows why the work matters. ”

Three Resume Tips

– Sumner Evans

tl;dr: “I think a lot of resume advice out there is tied to formatting, presentation, and writing style. While all of that is important, I think that it’s been well-adjudicated.

In this article, I would like discuss the content of your resume. I’m going to describe three rules that I made up to guide your resume’s content.”

You don't have to be smart if you can think clearly

– Sam Goedecke

tl;dr: “The difference between a “smart” engineer and a “strong” engineer is how they react to problems that aren’t solved instantly. A smart engineer might flail and struggle, hoping to find that flash of insight that eluded them; a strong engineer will have some process for methodically plodding away. 

Strong engineers can think clearly all the time, even if their highest speed isn’t quite as fast.”

AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy

– Charity Majors

tl;dr: “We can fix this. First, a reminder. We care about the same things. We are on the same side. None of us are a**holes. And we need each other desperately.

To chart a safe path between the Scylla of missed windows and the Charybdis of systems melting into slop, we need eyes on both threats as we coordinate, synchronize, and pull together. Hard. In order to do that, we need to do two things: knit our fractured realities back together, so we are rowing the same damn boat, and apply some engineering rigor to the problem.”

Industry News

Microsoft 365 outage drags on, but things are improving

tl;dr: “Microsoft’s efforts to fix what is now a multi-day outage affecting customers’ access to Outlook email and other Microsoft 365 services are entering day two. The company made significant progress in addressing the problem on Monday…

But as of Tuesday, the issues still are not fully resolved. Instead, Microsoft’s latest update shared on X says its “mitigation actions are continuing to progress,” which isn’t exactly the same as saying “all is well.”

Google’s answer to Canva is an AI tool where you prompt instead of design

tl;dr: “Google is entering the creative design market with a new image-creation and editing tool called Google Pics, which will become a part of its Google Workspace suite for business customers and premium Google AI subscribers.”

Singapore, Thailand to develop multi-year ASEAN agenda; deepen cooperation on food security, AI and connectivity

tl;dr: “Turning to emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI), the prime ministers noted that both countries have invested in AI and are looking at how to deploy it more widely across their economies. "There is scope for us to work together on practical applications – including in areas where both our countries have strengths, like manufacturing, healthcare and tourism," said PM Wong.”

Scientists teach human cells to compute like tiny computers

tl;dr: “Researchers have developed a way to program human cells to perform calculations and make autonomous decisions, similar to how computer chips work.

In a new study published in Nature Communications, Ph.D. student Keren Roas and Dr. Lior Nissim from Hebrew University created artificial genetic systems inside human cells that can process information and follow complex instructions. In the future, this advance could help scientists build smarter cell-based treatments for diseases such as cancer.”

Free Webinars For You

(Webinar) Scrum.org Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer: Estimation and Planning for Scrum Teams with Ludwig Harsch Tuesday, September 29, 2026 

“Scrum Teams are constantly asked when they will deliver, yet traditional planning built on assumptions instead of evidence keeps falling short. If you are wrestling with why your forecasts miss the mark, how to choose between Planning Poker, Affinity Estimation, or Magic Estimation, how to read a burn-down chart or Cumulative Flow Diagram without overselling certainty, or how to explain the impact of unplanned work and technical debt to stakeholders, this session is for you.”

(Webinar) Scrum.org The AI Delegation Audit - A Recurring Check for Work You’ve Handed to AI Tuesday, October 6,2026

“Most teams that hand work to AI never check what happens next. Someone routes a task to an AI engine, gets a result, and moves on. Nobody asks whether the AI should have kept that task, whether the routing call was right, or whether a bad decision is quietly repeating every Sprint.

The Delegation Audit is the artifact in the A3 Delegation System designed to address this gap: a recurring review of what your team assisted with, automated, or avoided, and whether those calls still hold up.”

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