Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings.

I spent a lot of the weekend looking around the Pokémon Worlds and XP here in San Francisco. While I'm not a competitive player, it's always nice to see such a powerful community come together and celebrate what they love.

I hope you had a great weekend and managed to rest!

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

• Context engineering with Dex Horthy An episode of the Pragmatic Engineer.
• Who are we now? An interesting and philosophical post by Jessica Kerr.

I came across this phrase: "Fire turning me to embers" (which, to be honest, I don't recall where I heard it or read it).

But that phrase made me think about all these situations where we're pushed forward by some instinct, or not wanting to let go, or just being excited about some possibility, only for that same thing to burn us out.

I've talked about burning out and sustainable pace in the past, but recently, with some AI topics coming to the forefront of projects, it's easy to get excited and build something outside the usual product space we navigate.

I think it's not even AI that's the hot topic, but anything outside of the usual maintenance hamster wheel.

But at the same time, since I'm tired, and maybe close to burning out, I feel eager to engage in this topic with my whole self. Disregarding warning signals, I see this happen across teams I work with.

Interest is at an all-time high at the beginning, but quickly dwindles towards inactivity. Other times, teams are eager to meet about a topic, but no one participates or shares.

It feels like filling space just to think of something else.

My current observation is that teams are running close to max mental capacity, even if not filling out their sprints with tasks. Long-term, deeper topics aren't tackled; novel or interesting topics are shared but not really researched.

Tell yourself and your teams to rest!

Your turn!

Let me know how you handle people on the verge of burnout, or loss of interest and not following through, on your teams. Let me know by replying to this email!

Happy coding!