Why are all CEOs of trillion dollar companies originally software engineers?

The International Institute of Software Management (iism.org) features a relatively long but worthwhile analysis of why there are so many successful CEOs who were developers. and guidance for leaders who started out as developers for applying their skills to wealth creation and success.

Better Code Review Practices

I recently reminded folks at work that it sometimes helps to look back at the issues we put into our code in the last 3-9 months.  We can formulate a short (3-5 item)  bullet list in a checklist.  The list is the 3-5 most-frequent types of errors we made in the recent past. The checklist reminds us during code reviews  to look for the same type of bug in  new code while we  are reviewing the new code.  Of course, the checklist must change, so there is effort in re-reviewing the last 3 months of bugs 4x per year and updating the checklist.  If all the bugs we put in are unique and there are no visible patterns, this effort is not worth doing. This idea comes from Steve McConnell's book Code Complete.  He calls the process "checklist driven code reviews" and he published a (long) list of common patterns of issues as examples.  Steve's book and approaches are quite old and modern integrated experiences and tools enable more, better refactoring, as well as some new difficulties for reviewers.

Over the weekend, I stumbled upon this interesting post from Mike Lynch with very-useful advice for how you should formulate your pull requests so that reviewers can more-easily review your code.

Qalea Drop, spiral wars book 7, by Joel Shepherd

I love all of the characters and the way the author integrates awe-and-wonder technology into this space opera.  I wish he would write only in this universe; I don't like the Cassandra Kresnov universe.  5/5 Stars.

Rclone -- rsync for cloud storage

I wrote about rsync and file synchronization in this blog almost 8 years ago.  And although the size and diversity of consumer and commercial services have expanded, the fundamental properties are the same.  The venerable rsync algorithm has stood the test of time.  We are still doing basically what Ray Ozzie published in 1974.

Rclone appears to be a fantastic tool for synchronizing your files across devices, commercial services, and file systems.  The diversity of its protocols and supported commercial services is amazing!  I plan to try it for some collections I have on g-drive, one-drive, s3, and devices in my home.

The last stand: blood on the stars 14 by Jay Allen

Now I remember why I put the series down, 2/5 Stars, meh.

A quantum murder by Peter F Hamilton

The magic system is not that good but the story and characters are loads of fun, 4/5 Stars.

Cobra Traitor by Timmothy Zahn

Disappointing ending to the trilogy, 2/5 Stars.

Mindstar Rising (1993) by Peter F Hamilton

I am catching up on earlier space opera books by Peter F Hamilton.  I enjoyed this one, despite the paradoxical magic system.  Great characters and funny British ethnocentrism. 3/5 Stars.

Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal

Mitch joined a book club where we read a business book every month.  In February 2021 we are reading Team of Teams.  The book is much better than I thought it would be and has some very strong scholarship that adds enormous heft to the concepts presented.

Teams are effective because they trust each other and they have a shared purpose. This is what the author calls "shared consciousness."  The author noticed, while losing his military conflict against a popular insurgency, that his enemies were distributed and united in their purpose, such that the usual "decapitation" attacks or systematic roll-up tactics of anti-insurgency were all failing.  In order to combat and defeat this "network of networks," he organized all of his forces identically, enabling and empowering his personnel to accomplish their mission.  The lessons and concepts are extremely valuable in many contexts .  4/5 Stars.

why does it take so long to ship software?

The shortest-possible answer is: "Complexity, complexity, complexity." But of course there is much more to unwrap to understand the issue and approaches to accelerating. This article contains some good thoughts on the subject.