Roelven

> "Absolutely wild time to be a home tinkerer."

This!! There is no end to the side projects and idea lists, and all of them feel possible

I thought it was called SI now

Getting so tired of the war metaphors in attempts to describe software development. We solve business problems using code, we don't make a living by role-playing military tactics. Chill out my dudes

Regardless of your job or responsibilities, if you are new to a certain domain, find users or customers to talk to. If you can't talk to them directly, find colleagues who do, and ask to be a fly on the wall. Meet at least 10. Write down their day to day jobs, their challenges and their frustrations. Even from just listening to others talk, you will get a good perspective.

To speed it up, write an interview script with a set of questions. Use an LLM to make the questions non-leading if you want, but point is to show colleagues who have customer contact your script. If you manage to do the interviews, record them, transcribe them and share them around. You are now a customer advocate who knows the customer's needs and wants.

Don't wait with doing this only after you've met the team, start immediately. Let this be your driving force to meet colleagues. It's useful, offer to share the results, or ask for question ideas to whoever wants to listen to you.

You now have laid the groundwork for your success. Now you can focus on the organisation, the team, the mission, the proposition, etc. Everyone you now meet, talk about how customers want to do A or B but can't, or about their challenges. People will appreciate your insight and you're off to a great start!

I've been running a pi-hole on my home network for years and I love it, it consistently blocks about 19% of outgoing requests. Some of the benefits for us are:

  - It disables (and hides) the annoying ads on our Samsung smart TV
  - Browsing is noticeably smoother (especially recipe websites on mobile!)
  - Most front-end browser trackers are blocked
  - It's now possible to see how often apps or devices tend to phone home by just logging into the Pihole web interface
  - We're not giving (most of) our DNS activity to our ISP
  - Updating to a newer version is a breeze with docker

Some thoughts for folks considering getting one (or more):

  - I've not locked it down further with a firewall yet to force all DNS requests to go through the Pihole, but I'm planning to. 
  - I won't run a Pihole container on my UDM as it will likely mess with future updates and settings, keeping things separate feels better.
  - Sometimes I consider adding more blocklists but every time I do, something gets annoying somewhere and I usually end up reverting to the standard config.

My pet peeve has become to report login flows or frontend interactions that break when the tracking script fails to load because of my Pihole. It doesn't happen often luckily :-).

(edit, formatting)

A book I keep coming back to (re-read every two years or so) and recommend others is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

It has shaped my thinking on 'what is good' or 'what does quality' mean. As an engineer it is easy to appreciate the author slowly going insane about the details he keeps coming back to, and as a human it is invaluable to have an understanding yourself of when something is 'good'.

Highly recommended.

This is an increasing problem in advertising everywhere. If we keep using attractive skinny people in our product shots, photo shoots and marketing communication, we will push a growing disconnect between that and actual, real people. When people can't identify (which is the initial goal of using people in your communication) with the messaging, they won't think it's for them.

Head of PM here. I lead 3 PMs in my current position at Styla.com and have taught product management at General Assembly courses.

I myself come from a self-taught programmer background and found myself questioning the product strategy or design decisions towards managers until I was offered a PM position. I do find the technical background enables me to level with devs quite easily but I don't think it's a requirement. A pattern that has been working very well at SoundCloud is that we liked to transition customer support people into a PM role.

Important feats or skills I additionally look for in good PMs are:

- be a users advocate. Has to be good at putting themselves into the users' position and transfer that perspective to the team.

- has to be really good at email. Org/management/soft skills aside, the most powerful tool of a PM is email.

- eager to learn and apply those learnings quickly.

- be comfortable with numbers but be skeptical at the same time. Data is important but be wary of bias.