Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings. Also welcome to October, fall, and the month of changes!

I hope you had a great weekend. I spent it trying to find a backpack in stores around where I live.

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

• The accidental history of 3000, 8080, and other port numbers
• Lauren Tan (aka poteto) on how she shipped 2500 PRs in a month
• Quick thoughts on GitHub’s Sept 23 incident

Maybe a bit too dramatic, but we're in the last 90 days of the year, and at least here in the US, a lot of people are starting to plan their Holidays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and end-of-year celebrations.

Last week, I started discussing how some large companies enforce holiday freezes to avoid release risks during critical times, when both more people use the product and fewer engineers are available to handle incidents.

This is also the time when some people have given up, and you start seeing projects being pushed into the new year: "Let's circle back in January". On the flip side, some people are pushing harder to deliver before all this "downtime" comes around, and they're still able to deliver one last win before the year ends.

All of this now, with the backdrop of using AI "harder" in our day-to-day.

So there might be this misguided idea that we can deliver whatever we're working on faster, but that's only true if several things around our delivery process are true.

While it's true that coding has become "cheaper", the bottleneck has moved for a lot of teams to code review, safe releases, continuous monitoring, and operational on-call rotations. Instead of tech debt, we might be having "context debt" because fewer people really know the code being produced than before.

For many teams, it might be safer to avoid releasing code they haven't read or understood.

Your turn!

How is your team or company preparing for the last quarter? Are you doing a final rush, or starting to wind down as the weeks go by? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!

Happy coding!