Talking about value with Kelsey Hightower

A newsletter that started as a personal learning and getting-in-touch project by Ivan Krnic grew into a sociotechnical newsletter covering topics of technical excellence, organizational improvements, and productivity.

✨ “If the business is not glad to see you, you may not be helping.”

-Jason Cox, Director of SRE at The Walt Disney Company

Are you helping, i.e., creating value? What is value anyway?

Value was the main topic of the QED 2023 conference. A good way to think about it is through four perspectives:

👉 How are we creating value for our customers (all of us have customers, no matter what we do)?

👉 How are we creating value for our people (in terms of their personal growth and support)?

👉 How are we creating value for the community (an ecosystem that is not a zero-sum game but a place where we can thrive together)?

👉 And how are we creating value for humankind (achieving all this without harming our planet)?

Some of these perspectives are very tactical, while others are strategic. Nevertheless, all of them should have their feedback loop.

I discussed value with our QED 2023 keynote speaker Kelsey Hightower, Distinguished Engineer at Google Cloud. Other QED talks will also be available soon, so stay tuned!

“THERE IS NO FAILURE IN SPORTS” – Today’s leadership lesson comes from Giannis Antetokounmpo, a Milwaukee Bucks basketball player. The most inspiring attitude towards “failure” I’ve seen in years!

So many bad takes — What is there to learn from the Prime Video microservices to monolith story – The Amazon Prime Video team recently published their experience of refactoring a microservice to a monolith. While many have welcomed this post as another proof that microservices were a wrong move, Adrian Cockcroft explains what really happened and how Serverless, microservices, and monoliths all have their place in a product lifecycle.

Monoliths are not dinosaurs – Finally, Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, reiterates that there’s no one-size-fits-all architecture. “Evaluating your systems regularly is as important, if not more so, than building them in the first place”.

Stack Overflow Traffic Drops as Coders Opt for ChatGPT Help Instead – ChatGPT is slowly taking a toll on other services – Stack Overflow saw a 14% drop in traffic month over month from March to April 2023. People using ChatGPT might be getting their answers but are missing out on something equally valuable – conversations and explanations of why some solutions are better than others.

The world is all about balance: have it too tight, and you’ll kill the creativity and rob your people of the chance to develop. Let it too loose, and standards will not be met. This goes for ownership, mentoring, accountability, planning, collaboration, and everything else in the work context.

Jocko Willink and Leif Babin learned the lessons of leadership dichotomy in a war zone and translated them to the business environment.