I have more personal projects than I can realistically work on right now. A shoe rack out of plywood, a decorative fence to hide the air conditioner, low voltage landscape lighting, enclosing the patio under the back deck, smart home automation, software tools I've wanted to build for years.
I was reading a post on Hacker News - a list of rules for being a new manager. Good rules. But some of them really are rules for new managers. I've been watching Gotham Chess's "slow-run" series, and it gets at this.
Last month, Yum Brands announced that it's selling Pizza Hut to LongRange Capital, a private equity firm, for $2.7 billion. The deal splits the brand in two - LongRange gets everything outside mainland China for about $1.
I was on a team that put junior developers into the on-call rotation earlier than we should have. The reasoning made sense on paper - they needed to learn the system, and the senior engineers were stretched thin.
I wrote a while back about framing problems with proposed solutions - the idea that "this is broken and here's what I think we could try" lands better than "this is broken" on its own. I still think that's mostly right.
On Monday our QA manager reported a performance regression in an upcoming release. A feature flag that was supposed to improve query performance was actually making things worse. The feature controlled automatic date filtering - ensuring that queries always included a 90-day window at most, which meant the database could use its date-based partitions instead of scanning entire tables.
I wrote a while back about learning to say no - pushing back on requests that don't fit the system, setting boundaries when you're stretched thin, getting comfortable with the discomfort of telling someone "this isn't the right call." That post was about building the skill.