A career ending mistake

This is lovely post by John Arundel (“Come for the schadenfreude, stay for the thought-provoking advice” indeed!). I especially like the section on how to become a good manager:

If you want to become a great manager, which I think is the only kind worth being, start practicing now. Learn people skills, communication, collaboration, psychology. Work on understanding the things that make different kinds of people tick. Manage yourself excellently. If you can’t organize yourself, how do you expect to be responsible for a team?

Code shufflin’

In Code shufflin’ Robin Rendle writes about why he, as a designer, still messes around with coding projects. I think this is why I continue to obsess over my side project as well—and proactively reach out to indie devs who use the Cloudflare platform to see if I can help.

I’d forgotten what it feels like not to ask permission for changes and instead make pull requests and break things. There’s a momentum to this sort of work that I crave deep down in my bones because it doesn’t rely on meetings or six months of quarterly planning or going up the chain of command. And what I love most about shuffling code around is that every day there’s progress, every day there’s a tiny degree of success you can point to.

How Murderbot Saved Martha Wells’ Life

I love the Murderbot books, and this interview with author Martha Wells is a delight:

Of all her characters, Wells has said, Murderbot is the one she’s put the most of herself into. It’s a surprising claim, until it’s not. It’s obvious that Wells feels a distance from other humans, even as she’s spent a life trying to relate to them, to understand them.

The cruelty of gentle parenting

This is a really interesting rebuttal of some modern parenting methods by Marilyn Simon:

The job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it.