Happy new year - I hope 2025 is treating you well so far. Once again, assorted things I’ve read and enjoyed - both non-tech and tech. Making the world a better place, engineering without ego, database-in-a-database, documentation archaeology, and more!

Assorted

I’m a big believer in the value of documentation and trying to keep organisational knowledge transparent and recorded, but usually I’m focussing on the relatively-short-term, or at least only a few years out. “Institutional memory and reverse smuggling” is an engineer’s tale of digging up information on a ~30 year old chemical plant, and some of the challenges along the way

midwesternish’s “There Are Only Three Mindsets: Which Are You?” is a neat model of the talk-work spectrum - a great reminder that “Do Things, Tell People” is a phrase where both parts are key. As a self-confessed “Martyr” I found this a useful prompt…!

I wrote about The Starfish Principle a few years back - the idea that even relatively small-seeming actions can still make a big difference for some. Adam Mastroianni’s “Underrated ways to change the world” is a great piece in a similar vein, with real concrete practical examples of how you can make the world a better place without needing to amass vast quantities of wealth or power, or giving everything up and away.

Mike Fisher’s “The Brilliant Jerk vs. Team Performance” is a great piece on the classic problem of the “Brilliant Jerk”, with some valuable references and pragmatic advice.

Finally, Carmen’s “Collecting open secrets” was just a really lovely read about the beautiful complexities of people.

Tech

Honeycomb’s “Against Incident Severities and in Favor of Incident Types” is a neat approach for clearer categorisation and communication around incidents, that feels like a great way to help clarify some of the potential complexity of the many different kinds of incident.

incident.io’s “How we page ourselves if incident.io goes down” is an insightful exploration into the challenges of using your own product as an incident management company, covering some of the really neat things they do to ensure reliable service and avoid the obvious dangers of depending on themselves.

Dan McKinley’s “Egoless Engineering” is a great presentation on the importance of empowering and supporting your teammates, and acting as a force-multiplier within your organisation. I’m also a big fan of his “Choose Boring Technology” and much of the rest of his .CLUB Club.

Lewin Day’s “You Can Use LEDs As Sensors, Too” is a fascinating neat trick - possibly not hugely practical, but interesting nonetheless!

Finally, SQLite is great, PostgreSQL is great, so frectonz/pglite-fusion brings them together in a real “Yo Dawg” style, enabling you to create and operate on SQLite databases within your Postgres database(!)

So

As ever, I hope these were of interest!

Feedback always appreciated, as well as shares to other folks you think might enjoy:

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Cheers, Kristian

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