beastcoast

(2025)

Lego used to encourage building new things by putting alternate builds on the back of the box, but intentionally not giving you the instructions. Now they do 3-in-1 for certain sets instead, which misses the point of that.

My therapist frames this as "family of origin" (FOO) vs "family of choice" (FOC).

TIL that Lombok and Java are islands in the same country…

I just did though - got lots of results about the massacre. Not sure what you’re alluding to.

I’ve been on teams that did generic names, and inevitably you end up with names like “work manager service” - whose work? Then it becomes an acronym, like WPS, and everyone ignores it anyways :)

Your site doesn’t explain your product very well. I know about GTD but I literally haven’t heard of any of the other products listed in the page. The screenshots are tiny and hard to parse on mobile. The descriptions of each feature include many paragraphs of philosophy before getting to what it actually _does_. I suggest “bottom line up front” and a clearer description of the product that better appeals to people who haven’t tried alternatives before.

Time to get a new TPM. Any TPM worth their salt should be doing everything in their power to catalog and mitigate those risks, and communicate them upwards. Lack of communication in both directions and adversarial conversations with engineers is a whole parade of red flags.

That said, Gantt charts absolutely have their place alongside Agile. Our budget and goals are set yearly so inevitably there’s going to be milestones and work back dates to meet, as well as cross-team/org dependencies to track.

Amazon has decided the worst of all worlds: a return to office mandate (stick) and agile seating plans with no assigned seating (stick). No carrots…

Away teaming is definitely a last resort at Amazon, and has all the pitfalls mentioned here - much better to do a budgetary transfer so the host team is properly resourced to make the changes, assuming the feature doesn’t make it into the host teams operational plan.

Seems like Blind should get in on this game, since the premise of the app is that it requires a company email address. Use an LLM to extract insights from the comments and give them to prospective job hunters for a small fee, or even just run ads.

Even worse than that - Amazon spent dozens of engineer years migrating their wiki from PHP MediaWiki to Java XWiki, pretty much for that reason only, and for dubious customer benefit. There was a very epic post mortem at the end of it.

Amazon is actually better thought of as a collection of independent startups with their own software architectures, roadmaps and P&Ls. There’s commonly used infrastructure but very little is really mandated at the company level.