So here it is 52 things I enjoyed in 2025. I hope you find one or two that you enjoy too.

52 things I enjoyed in 2025

1. These 11 Laws of Showrunning made me think a lot about being a leader, having a vision, and trying to create that vision through the neccesarily imperfect medium of work.

2. 30 minutes with a stranger is not only a set of brilliant insights into what happens when strangers talk to each other but also a lovely webpage, thoughtful, different and well fitting to the content.

3. The core idea of preaching to The Choir, by Rebecca Solnit stayed with me a lot over the year—how activating the people who agree with us is often more powerful than trying to persuade those who don’t.

4. Nice insights in these nine charts that explain what’s going on with London transport. I’ve used “Wednesday is the new Big Night Out” as a tagline a lot.

5. Paul Krugman’s been writing about inequality and it’s really good.

6. I love love loved Colm Tóibín talking about the new Pope, the old Pope, and Jannick Sinner’s perfect game of tennis.

7. I again listened to (nearly?) every episode of Oxide and Friends this year, my favourite episode was probably this one about a multi year migration but there were loads of good ones.

8. This interview with Na Kim—book designer turned painter—is so good, I love her bluntness, “Right, but why start writing to be a bad writer? That’s so stupid.” Couldn’t agree more.

9. This In Our Time episode on slime moulds got me briefly wistful about not studying biology.

10. A super thoughtful analysis of why North England is poor, hard to validate but a lot of the reasoning resonated with me.

11. Turns out 1952-1967 was The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils as competing companies tried to create the perfect pencil (and you can still pick one up today).

12. Giles Turnbull wrote some great posts tihs year and I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate this one about evolving strategy through enquiry into my everyday work. (He’s also shared everything he’s written about ‘working in the open’.)

13. We’ve all come across this one right—programmers have a strange tendency to imagine living a rural lifesystle as an idyllic alternative to their current situation.

14. I came across this old Deb Chacra on post on the idea of abudant, decentralised energy and found it chimed with my views a lot—we should pursue the goal of green energy for the abudance it brings. It seems that we on that road though as South Korea begins building world’s largest 108 MW hydrogen power plant and Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity.

15. I really wish I didn’t read this sort of thing and just nod along so wholeheartedly but from the conversations I have with the women I work with, it’s worth everyone knowing these survival tips for women in tech. And worth men thinking about why they exist and what we’d have to do for them not to.

16. A clear and pratical guide to typography. And a cool font inspired by Indian truck lettering to go with it: Honk.

17. Sarah Perry has taken a great deal of time, thought and theory to expound the virtue of deep laziness and capture something that I am often trying to explain to people about how my mind works; I feel like there are harmonies that when you find them have enormous leverage over what you are trying to achieve. Rather than forcing them, you need to sort of seek out the right vibrations, to understand the flow and then adjust yourself to be carried forward by it. Anyway she explains better than I do (or maybe Bruno Gianelli put it best with his sailboats).

18. An interesting variant on open source licensing—including the requirement to “show how you used it”.

19. These lovely 4 panel comics remind me of the gentler ones in “A Softer World”.

20. Two unconventional ways to arrive at mathematical proofs: one from a comment on a 4chan Post and the other by 17 year old Hannah Cairo, who found home schooling suffocating and so dropped in on some graduate classes at Berkeley. I love the illustrations on Hannah’s transparencies — I wish I’d had the wherewithall to illustrate my problem sheets at uni.

21. There were many great Ask Pollys this year and Do You Prioritize Status Over Joy? really resonated. Something subtle changed in me a few years ago when I realised I could prioritise seeking joy in all parts of life.

22. Hamonshu: A Japanese Book of Wave and Ripple Designs.

23. I was reading and enjoyin this poem I Wasn’t Always This Ugly by Roque Dalton and then saw it was translated by Natasha Wimmer who has translated a bunch of my favourite books—so do I love the poet or the translator?

24. I love a good bowl of Pho, so it was cool to learn its origin story.

25. Lovely detailed illustrations of racoons were a feature of PC Connection magazine for many years. The beautiful cute pictures naturally make you wonder whether our current dominant visual language is overly serious and bland—what would the racoons of today look like? Would they be taken seriously at all? Would that matter?

26. It’s so cool to find old things from the internet that you’ve missed, like this hypertext sci fi novel written in the 1990s about all the passengers on a tube train.

27. And another one I missed at the time a dude who cooked all the recipes from the Big Fat Duck Cookbook. This is the kind of thing I could have seen myself doing (pre-kids!), though I doubt I’d have the stamina for it.

28. I love a story of an organisation that runs itself in a different way to the prevailing business models of our day, like iconic French glassmaker Duralex being taken over by a workers’ cooperative. It also made me vividly remember the brown Duralex mugs my grandparents had that we’d drink our afternoon tea out of.

29. This has been doing the rounds, and rightly so. A great exploration of what we lose when we make a system accountable for decision making rather than people.

30. Earlier in the year there was a major blackout of the power grid in Spain and Portugal and I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to understand what happened. This also led me to trying ti understand the challenges of starting a grid back up from total collapse.

31. Joan Westenberg has been an interesting new (to me) voice this year writing on work, I enjoyed a lot of her pieces but particularly this one on how smart people stay stuck by mistaking optimising for the system they are in with actual impact.

32. This is a great list: What Makes for a Healthy Society?.

33. Spend an hour with Wes Anderson hearing about the evolution of his thinking about his films, and the choices he made along the way to develop his particular narrative style. I’d love to hear an hour on Rushmore alone to be honest.

34. I’ve really enjoyed these visual maps to help you learn the core concepts of an area of software development like frontend development.

35. Take yourself back to the early 2000s and get lost in this deep repository of information on riding a bike safely on the road.

36. There’s a weird bird call in a Charlie’s Angels movie and you can bet someone tried to track it down.

37. A detailed analysis of the economics of running a successful YouTube channel and why it doesn’t often add up.

38. There is an official list of cocktails, from the International Bartenders Association, so of course someone drank them all. This also doubles as a study in cocktail bars and what you are looking for when you go out for a drink in one.

39. You didn’t know that you needed this root cause analysis of why Kevin got left home alone but you surely do.

40. Trees make rain, and chains of trees make chains of rain.

41. Amongst his other talents, George Orwell also nailed how to make a nice cup of tea.

42. Science fiction is a fertile source of weird and wonderful interfaces that have something to teach us about the interface choices we’ve made and the roads that we haven’t taken.

43. the web needs more weirdness. and more excitement. and more personality.

44. This is hard to explain but I promise you, worth your time. 7,000 words on pansharpening (“…an image fusion task in satellite image processing, used on most of the satellite imagery on commercial maps…”) that takes in the ontology of picture, trade offs in software design, what people buy and what they do not, images as a guide to history, the point of data, and more. All in a markdown file, somewhere down the file tree of a pansharpening model. If you have a few minutes, the readme isn’t too shabby either.

45. Two stories of how poverty can have an invasive and all consuming effect: how childhood financial insecurity can imprison your financial thinking for life and the story of someone surviving on the poverty borderline, and trying to hide it.

46. Panic Studios created a small handheld gaming device (with a crank!) called the Playdate and did a really lovely series of podcasts about what it is like to go from being a software company to trying to develop hardware. But the best episode is about how some irregularities led to their financial controller becoming an investigator and chasing down some opportunistic thieves.

47. ‘No One Else Has a Bike Like Mine’.

48. The story of the first linux user in India—floppy disks, 1kb/s download speeds and people who won’t take you seriously because they have a site license for some enterprise software.

49. We’ve all heard how LLMs love em dashes, and had our own feels on the topic, now the em dash responds to the AI allegations.

50. I have a long affection for the 76ers from the Allan Iverson years (see last year’s list!) and have been fascinated by Joel Embiid’s continual quest to carry the team to the finals essentially by himself. It turns out he is carrying a lot more and has put up significant walls to protect himself.

51. Craig Mod had a good year with a book out and putting together a slow online community but I enjoyed his classic regular muses on travel and society the best, like this one about the point of small businesses and what happens when overtourism hits.

52. You made it to the end! Well done! Reward yourself with the superb Tiny Desk concert from C. Tangana from the pandemic, a dream of how to live a lovely musical life.

This is interesting to me because often Principal engineers have become Principal engineers through stopping writing lots of code and instead doing a complex combination of teaching, sharing ideas, demonstrating good decision making, pattern matching and business case understanding.

But what I am hearing and seeing is that super senior engineers have certain properties that are proving very effective at getting engineering organizations behind AI code generation:

1. they have high autonomy to choose which problems they work on (at least some of the time)
2. they are considered no bullshit / high trust tech people (VPs, directors, managers generally don’t get this privilege)
3. they are spending a lot of time methodically investigating and demonstrating what is and what is not possible with llms, giving them huge credibility when they talk about LLMs
4. they are using that methodical investigation to pattern match llm capabilities to problems that they’ve seen before
5. they are using their business case sense to make good calls about where the actual ROI is right now

The combination of time/autonomy, credibility built through past success, pattern matching and business casing I think is common to Principal types, at least at big companies. But the additional x-factor here seems to be a lot of hands on, rigorous experimentation with the tools themselves. The sort of thing that can’t happen if you’re in meetings all day.

I’ve seen this combination a little bit before. I think many people know the type of CTO who’s the serial generator of new ideas and there’s something of that to this. Also when I worked at Meta there was an archetype for super senior IC engineers called something like “code machine” where it was acknowledged that some engineers could move a whole problem space forward through intense bursts of deep coding. I’ve seen that person around occasionally at other companies too.

But this feels a little different. It feels like we still need the skills that those Principals were exercising yesterday through meetings and documents. But the success cases are having them spend a lot more time at the keyboard than they were before, to iteratively map and validate the quality of the new tech against real problems. Then they tell us what works and what doesn’t, from a place of credibility.

So if you are wondering how to accelerate your AI coding adoption, and particuarly in how to build trust with a large engineering population with varying views on AI, perhaps supplement the “C-suite says this has to happen” by finding the senior IC engineers that can do this stuff and nudge them to apply their hard earned skills to it (cos we all know they don’t like being told what to do 😆).

Appendix 1: people have asked me what I think about domains other than AI coding. I don’t have direct data here but I suspect an analogy runs true: find a credible, senior practitioner who has time, autonomy and is respected for their craft and get them to systematically test what the AI can do whilst broadly sharing their results.

Appendix 2: I’m a product manager, can the person I describe here be a product manager? I think I’m the developer tools / infrastructure / whatever we can this things space, there’s often a very thin line between a really good product manager and a really good engineering IC of the type I describe above. This difference in this case is that if you are not a great developer then your iteration speed and judgement is going to be a little bit off. And that loss is enough to open up a credibility gap to an engineering org solving a tooling problem in my experience.

Having said that, very soon after this moment comes a moment where the technical ability of the AI meet the complex sociological system called a company. And making sure we get value in that situation is, in my experience, where product managers shine.

So here are 52 things I enjoyed in 2024. I hope you find one or two that you enjoy too.

52 things I enjoyed in 2024

1. The best thing I saw all year is Dua Lipa’s original Tiny Desk Concert from the pandemic. I watched it at least 40 times. I had not consciously listened to a Dua Lipa song until I sat down to watch her set at Glastonbury in August. At the end of the year she was my top played artist, and I was in the top 0.5% of listeners.

2. I thought and read a lot about blogs and blogging, and having an independent web presence this year. That theme will show up in a few links I expect, including this philosophy for maintaining a digital garden, a personal space on the web.

3. The hottest restaurant in France is an all you can eat buffet. (Also best title of the year?)

4. I was a bit obsessed by this user experience prototype where someone experimented with building a single stream of their total digital lift.

5. It turns out modernity killed Dracula.

6. It’s fun to watch an accomplished biker ride on everything at the new Adidas campus, or try to do a series of backflips on a moving train.

7. A lovely breakdown of writing an iOS native app by yourself over many years. All the decision points driven by simplicity, vision, and not setting out for money or size.

8. How many fucks do you have to give and where should you give them? Here’s one answer: A unified theory of fucks.

9. Symmetry is boring.

10. A profile of the Google researchers who wrote “Attention is all you need”, the foundational paper on transformer architectures for AI.

11. A writer who spent many years teaching English in China catches up with a new generation of Chinese students who moved to America to see how they’ve found it.

12. The guy who created Panic studios who built things like a historic ftp app, a handheld gaming computer, and the angry goose game, saw a wild mural in a McDonalds and got curious about it.

13. A playful UX experiment evolving the infinite canvas.

14. I love running water in the outdoors so I am seriously considering copying this dude who built a waterfall in his backgarden

15. There’s lots of little homes being built in this “community word processor for writing poetry, journals, and logs”, and lots of vacant lots.

16. Someone died and ended up paying a $7m tax bill in the US. But who was it?

17. In the early 2000s the fashion world was overturned by bloggers of all things. And weirdly I was reading a lot of those blogs at the time, so I felt very nostalgic reading this history of the scene.

18. A sublime article outlining the provocative thought that the finance industry contributes net zero to our society. I’m 100% here for this view.

19. In the Punjab in northern India, where my family is from originally, people build ornate water towers on the tops of their houses. As a kid on holiday I always liked looking for ones shaped as animals.

20. Some people at work are Poets, others are Police. You need both to get shit done. Can you guess which one I identify as?

21. Are fragile or robust solutions better? Inconclusive but I couldn’t agree with the opening lines of this article more: “I have an almost moral dislike for the four-wheeled suitcase.”

22. There are annual awards for Tiny Websites, and the shortlist is really lovely.

23. The Excel World Championships is a thing, it takes place in Vegas, and it was big on ESPN and YouTube last year. Who knew? (Also click that link just to see the page design).

24. I lost a very enjoyable weekend to going down the rabbit hole of James Hoffman’s coffee YouTube channel and it all started with this breakdown of Nespresso pods. Be careful, you might find yourself buying a £500 coffee grinder after an hour or two on there.

25. I’d never come across the How to be a hacker handbook before (from the 90s!) but the words resonated a lot with me, “Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help.” That’s pretty sound in my book.

26. I, of course, listened to many episodes of the Oxide and Friends podcast (maybe all of them this year?!). A I enjoyed a lot were the one about the history of GPUs with Raja Koduri and the one about why Oxide uses Cockroach DB

27. China Analyst Dan Wang has for many years written a brilliant letter with his reflections on China’s economic and political changes over the previous 12 months and his 2023 letter was his last. That’s left a huge hole in my January reading and I expect I will be a little bit dumber as a result.

28. Another reflection on building an app (and a business), this time from the founder of a iPad app, Muse, a canvas based tool for thinking. Reflecting on how they set out to build something big and ended up as a one person company long term has given me a lot to think about what success means were I ever to start another company.

29. When we were writing the Core Infra Product Vision, Max, Mårten and I used a few classic technical vision-y texts as inspiration and one of them was this, Design considerations for an anthropophilic computer by Jeff Raskin, an early desinger at Apple. It describes how he wants a computer to be and is full of short opinionated sentences like “Seeing the guts is taboo.” We didn’t manage to do as well with ours but I feel there’s echoes of this.

30. Here’s a clear and thorough explanation of what a board of directors does (also what good looks like and how you might get on one).

31. 57 sandwiches that define New York City, with pictures. This one is for Morgy.

32. I had an ethereal experience with a Taiwanese beef noodle soup in Bao (a restaurant) about halfway through the year. I then spent a few months trying to recreate it and ended up landing on this recipe which gets pretty close.

33. The puzzling and heartbreaking story about a teenager who jumped to his death from a fancy London towerblock starts peeling back the layers of shady money in the city and the cast of dangerous characters who are moving it around. Also contains one of my favourite descriptions of the year: “London is the capital of pristine façades, often painted in wedding-cake shades of cream or ivory; the city’s dominant aesthetic is literally whitewash.”

34. Shigeru Ban is an architect who tests the limits of building in wood and paper.

35. Reggie is a guy who invites people to sing with him in the street. The results are often surprising and joyous. He always asks people afterwards: “Now that you’ve sung, how do you feel?”

36. Some thoughts on how calendars could take advantage of layers.

37. Of course, Wikipedia editors are getting good at finding AI hoax articles (but probably not that good?)

38. Sally Rooney turned to Wittgenstein when she got stuck writing her latest novel. I knew I liked her.

39. Maybe you can make yourself more lucky.

40. You didn’t know that you needed to watch a 4 hour review of a visit to Disney’s Star Wars hotel but trust me you do. The visit didn’t go well, Disney closed the hotel, and we all learned a lot about the economics, passion, and attention to detial needed to satisfy true fans.

41. How to build a writing habit and how to build a creative practice. Both very practical but one is direct and one is dreamy.

42. Simple tips on how to make a spreadsheet more accessible.

43. The best place to find something out is still often a forum.

44. Given no one likes doing software engineering estimates and also we need some way of doing estimates, what’s the minimal viable method for estimation that we should follow.

45. This brilliant short story, about a Marine who is waiting to hear whether he’ll have to lead his platoon to the ground invasion of Japan in World War II, made me think a lot about fear, and waiting, and leadership.

46. An art historian reappraises a 18th Century painting and discovers that its subject, Francis Williams, was actually a distinguished scientist and contemporary of Newton. Williams had been overlooked because he was Black and a colonial rival of his had buried his legacy by using common racist stereotypes of the day.

47. Contemporary company logos but if they’d been designed in the 80s.

48. Two services encouraging you to build your owner corner of the internet: mmm.page and micro.blog.

49. Ask Polly was, as always, a marvel for the whole year. Here’s one that I (somewhat predictably) liked: Tolerating unknowns will make you stronger

50. I’ve almost read 20 books this year, for the first time since I’ve had 2 children. The best one was All Fours by the magnificent Miranda July (though it elicits strong opinions one way or the other).

51. People & Blogs interviews people about their blogs. A new person every week. They ask the people to suggest other blogs. It is easy to lose yourself in blogs for a few days.

52. Wow, well done for getting this far. I find it nice to do this sort of thing so thank you for humouring me. Finish off with New Order’s Blue Monday played on vintage Casio instruments.

• Sometimes people ask me if I’m technical and I don’t really know how to reply to this question. To most software developers I say “not really”, which I judge by the fact that I’ve never written production code for a system before (well, I have once, story for another day) but I have given out a lot of opinions on how that should happen. So I’m roughly trying to say something along those lines — take my words with the caveat that I’ve never done your job.

• But in other contexts I’m relatively technical. When my parents were moving out of their house recently I found a “Teach yourself Linux in a week” book from when I was about 16 (complete with distro on CD) where I’d made notes in the margins. I made my first money from computer stuff after teaching myself a HTML/CSS/grid based design and writing wordpress themes. This was in the era of “you can solve any problem using wordpress plugins” (maybe that era hasn’t ended?)

• I came into contact with Heroku because I was writing little apps in Ruby. And I was writing apps in Ruby because of Why’s Poignant Guide. This was a book that spoke to me deeply. It was delightfully weird and compelling. I completely did not understand it but I wanted to. So I set out learning to write Ruby code. Probably the only mental models I have of writing code were developed from this book — I still think of all functions in terms of passing variables down a chute and doing things to them along the way.

• At the beginning I was just writing little scripts and running them on my laptop to learn the language. But after a while I started to put together the HTML and css I’d learned with the ruby using a delightful little framework called Sinatra (I love that it still has basically the same website as it did in 2009). Who thought I was going to say Rails there? Well I did use Rails as well and it was a lot smaller in those days (I think it was 2.3ish that I started on) but I never really used a database for any of my apps (that was fun, I stored things in arrays and everything got “wiped” when the app restarted) so I didn’t really need the “power” of rails. As I started experimenting with writing apps I started to get confused about how I was going to get the app off of my laptop and onto the internet. In the past I’d always either bought some space from a web hosting company and ftp-d my files into the right location or used wordpress.com and hacked around with it. Now I started digging into setting up a server so that it could run ruby, and including a web server? And somehow hooking that up to the internet? This was a bit of a puzzle. But I could probably work most of this out, I knew my way around a linux box. But what was worse is I had no money. So how was I going to get my hands on a server in the first place?

Enter git push heroku master. It is difficult to explain the magic of this command to me. I mean for a start it made me put everything I’ve ever subsequently done under source control, which was wild power. But the joy of typing the command, hitting enter and then seeing your app live on cuddly-koala-539.herokuapp.com in a few seconds transformed for me what you could do with code. I was writing all sorts of weird silly apps after that. Memorably I wrote an app for a friend’s 30th birthday that asked you what you’d eaten in the last few days and predicted what kind of consistency your poo would be as a result [content warning: there’s pictures at the end of that url].

• Beyond the core user experience of making it super simple to deploy an app in pretty much any language with one command, Heroku also made some great breakthroughs in other areas of developer experience. The documentation was superb — until Stripe came along it was known as the gold standard in docs for a developer focused product. The 12 factor principles! Why instant deployment matters! Using containers before docker! The postgres service was so well designed and reliable that it contributed to postgres getting alongside mysql as an open source sql choice. The whole structure of addons, making it simple to extend your app with a db or queue etc was great. There were so many ideas that transformed our thinking about what building software on cloud infra should look like. When I first ran a team building infrastructure I shamelessly used Heroku both in my own learning and as the default example of how we should approach user experience.

• Fast forward a bunch of years and I was on stage in New York at Velocity conference 2014 giving a talk about how my team had built “Heroku for government”. It was git push heroku master but the build pipeline included performance tests, compliance checks, making sure you’d set up monitoring and alerting, logs, databases etc. And all the while I pushed my team to give people the experience of that one command. I was chasing the speed and simplicity of that first deploy, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. Really I still am — there’s a lot more space for that kind of magic in what we do. We’re still selling a variant of the “set up your own server” world, when I suspect at least a subset of our users would be empowered to create amazing things if we had the feedback loop speed and simplicity of git push heroku master.

So if it was so awesome, why wasn’t Heroku more successful? Why aren’t we all running our infrastructure on the platform?

• Cost was a major factor. Not so much the actual cost, but the feeling of it. You went from being able to do quite a lot for free to the next tier of payment being close to $100 a year — not a lot by any means but a bit of a jump for the casual user. At the other end of the scale, you had a lot of people complaining that Heroku was expensive because they were comparing with EC2 costing on AWS (“just throw elastic beanstalk on it, it’s basically heroku”). This massively underestimated both the additional cost of managing that EC2 instance (i.e. running a team doing upgrades, patches, connectivity, config management, secrets, etc etc) and the value of making these things smooth from a developer experience, something we’ve always been bad at factoring into our calculations.

• I think configurability was the big one though. Heroku’s service was initially optimised around a particular case — running rails with postgres — and it was very very good at this. It did expand out beyond this, in particular with great language support through buildpacks. But once you got beyond running one app and a database, well things got a little complicated. If you were running a lot of apps, there was a bit of a question of how you link them together. But more than that, Heroku worked if you bent your infrastructure to the assumptions of the platform. But anyone bringing their infrastructure to Heroku would find that it wasn’t really the kind of thing you could alter to fit your world. This is wildly different from the “winner” of the cloud infrastructure, AWS, where everything is a low level configurable building block. Even the higher level abstractions expose tonnes of configuration and interoperability. AWS met people where they were, in the total messiness of their current situation. Heroku asked people to mould themselves to a particular way of doing things, with the promise of speed and smoothness. A lot of post-Heroku platform work is about this core trade off, between exposing everything and having to deal with supporting every possible configuration, and exposing a lot less but making your users fall in line with the choices you’ve made. There are ways that we can try to do both but I don’t think as a discipline we’ve worked out what the right path is.

• People get weird about infrastructure. We fall in love with it, with every knob and dial that we can turn to make it just so. But the configurability is also our curse. I’m still of the opinion that we are waiting for our iPhone moment — we’ve got the feature phones and you can send an email if you get the exact right incantation of steps but we haven’t reached the level where we know what the user is trying to do, and can give them an awesome way of getting them straight there.

That went in a different direction to what I was thinking. Consider it part 1 in a potentially repeating series of answers to the question “Are you technical?”.

So, in the second half of last year I didn’t get round to publishing what I’d read. Luckily I still kept the record, so here’s an update. It’s missing a lot of articles but the books are here. Things slowed down quite a lot as I was working again and we had our second daughter in August, two kids doesn’t leave a huge amount of time for reading!

In 2019 I read 21 books, and a lot of New Yorker articles (I’ve put a few stand outs below). Nearly 2 books a month feels a bit ahead of where I’ll get to this year. 2019 is really a year of two halves, 14 books in the first 6 months, 7 in the second (after Lily was born).

Books

• Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan — I read this after loving the excerpt in the New Yorker. It reminded me I’d always dreamed of learning to surf. It was good to start with but I couldn’t finish it. Two reasons: 1. I feel like he never really described whatever was driving him around the world in search of the perfect wave. He touched on family issues, not fitting in, self esteem…but never approached them with emotional honesty. 2. There are only so many times you can read a description of the minutiae of catching a wave.
• Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram — I liked this a bit in the way I like the Lyndon Johnson biographies: it was a picture of a person entirely different to me. Boyd was an asshole. He was also brilliant. But a significant part of what he achieved came from his being an asshole.
• H Is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald — I have fond memories of this book but I found it hard going at times. The overall picture of connecting deeply with an alien nature at a time of grief is powerful. I liked her descriptions of connecting with the natural world even more.
• The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead — great book, I really enjoyed it. Hard at times. Whitehead really gets you situated in these bits of history that have passed a lot of people by.
• Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell — very very good. An “overlooked classic”, it surprised me with its psychological depth and reality. And a great story.
• In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne — some great language, natural and vivid. But a lot of hollow characters, a bit too obvious what’s on their mind. Then they go and say things like “embers in her mouth” and it seems out of place.
• Netherland by Joseph O’Neill — a little dull. Not the right pace for me. Some of the thinking about fatherhood I liked, but there wasn’t enough.

Articles

• The Lingering Of Loss by Jill Lepore — deeply moving New Yorker article about the death of a friend.
• Four Years In Startups by Anna Wiener — excerpt of Uncanny Valley, the tech bro exposé. Chilling how pervasive and real this is.
• Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change? — maybe.
• How TikTok Holds Our Attention by Jia Tolentino — Jia Tolentino has fast become one of my fav New Yorker writers. It shows how the magazine is changing that they can publish this insightful and grounded discussion of TikTok, something that would have totally passed them by in the past.

I’m back at work so reading is slowing down. A bit more variety and more New Yorker articles as I’m cracking on through the pile I’d built up. Only the articles I really enjoyed here.

Books

• Milkman by Anna Burns. Outstanding book. For anyone who has lived (or particularly grew up) in a culture of hierarchy, gaslighting, spoken and unspoken rules, anger and otherness. Can’t tell you how much this book churned me up, in a good way.
• Africa’s tarnished name by Chinua Achebe — a few short essays from the Nigerian master. All very good, “Travelling white” a particular highlight.
• Kudos by Rachel Cusk — so I completed the triology, pretty much the day the paperback version of Kudos came out. It maintained the fantastic quality to the end. My favourite of the three was Transit.
• The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You by Julie Zhuo — very good exposition of what management should look like in contemporary technology organisations. I agree with, and try to implement, almost everything in this book. In some ways is this is pretty odd, given how awful a company Facebook is overall (see Wired article below). You can read this as a book that shows how you can build high functioning teams utterly divorced from any idea of doing the right thing.
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré — don’t remember when I read this but I did. I love the book and it reminded me how good the old school Alec Guinness TV show is.

Articles

• All will be well by Yiyun Li — one of my favourite writers. Story that reminded me a little of bits of Americanah. As Li works through the death of her son in her writing she is getting into challenging territory that is emotional and thought-provoking.
• Color and light by Sally Rooney — a writer who has a strong effect on me:

  Fuck. How is it that everything Sally Rooney writes leaves me as breathless and sick as a teenager on a first date?

  — Kalbir (@proustian) April 3, 2019

• The Making of the Fox News White House by Jane Mayer — how Fox News is a propaganda machine for the Trump White House. Superb article.
• The Female Chef Making Japan’s Most Elaborate Cuisine Her Own by Helen Rosner — ostensibly about kaiseki in LA but underneath is a description of achieving great things through gentle, sensitive determination. A model for a different path to greatness.
• 15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook by Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein — long long article about a difficult year for Facebook. The sad part is that they weathered it using all of their usual crappy tactics.
• Rhiannon Giddens and What Folk Music Means by John Jeremiah Sullivan — Black musicians are reviving the Black lineage of folk music in the US. Singers that regularly drew tens of thousands to their concerts have been totally airbrushed from the historical record. Also introduced me to the wonderful Rhiannon Giddens, an extravagantly talented musician and ethnographer.
• The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelona by Rebecca Mead — I was talking to a Barcelona resident about AirBnB just before reading this article. Lots to think about in the balance between economic growth through tourism and the destruction of local communities (see also: gentrification).

• Outdoor Voices Blurs the Lines Between Working Out and Everything Else By Jia Tolentino — Jia Tolentino is fast becoming a go-to New Yorker writer for me. This is an article about the founder of the “Outdoor Voices” clothing line, a woman who sounds like the high priestess of our “influencer” moment. There was a line in this that I loved:

  I introduced myself, and she instantly recalibrated her vibrancy to fir the contours of my attention, like a phone screen adjusting its brightness according to the light.

• Can Elizabeth Warren win it all? by Sheelah Kolhatkar — I think Elizabeth Warren is my favourite Democratic candidate for 2020. This article explains how many of her views were formed by her time fighting for the rights of ordinary people who become bankrupt. And just how she is a bit of an all-round badass.
• Inside the Cultish Dreamworld of Augusta National — Augusta National is Disneyland, if Disneyland was designed for hedge fund managers and southern businessmen. This look inside makes it clear how genuinely bizarre the whole spectacle is, and explains how they keep it looking so pristine.

Okay, there were a few more but I think that’s a decent selection.

Sometimes, though, that energy is missing. I’ve worked on projects like that, I’m sure you have too. Instead of energy and harmony, there’s friction. People sitting just feet apart don’t know each other’s names, let alone what the other teams are working on.

I used to work for the UK government’s tax revenue department, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), and we did something very deliberate to tackle this problem: we started doing showcases. A showcase is a fortnightly run-through of what every team has been doing.

At its well oiled peak at HMRC, over 20 teams presented in our showcase. Two people spent half a day doing set up and facilitating. We almost always completed within one hour. We celebrated, we commiserated, we complained, occasionally we were wowed. We regularly had 150 people there, from inside and outside the digital and technology team. Visitors were always impressed at the sheer energy of the thing.

As our organisation’s focus changed and the wider team grew bigger, we worked hard to establish what the showcase was for, and to improve how it was run. It initially focused on demos of working software, but as it grew it also became a forum for showing how to grapple with the hard problems you need to solve when building user facing government services.

To keep the quality of showcases high, we developed a set of principles. These emerged from asking ourselves questions that focused on the purpose of the showcase as a session for sharing information and building connections between the teams in our organisation. They helped us answer questions like: are the right people attending? What is useful for the people attending? Are we learning about each other as teams and people, or just as roadmap items or new features?

The principles that helped us were:

1. Every team has to present every fortnight. No exceptions. We wanted people to learn who other teams were and what they were doing — even when they were stuck. In a world of rapid delivery, if “nothing happened”, that was a story. Otherwise everyone was shipping something every week, so you could talk about it.
2. Each team has 2 mins, that’s it. A time limit forced people to share the most important things. People sometimes abused the limit to show something they were particularly passionate about but in general we helped people to get very good at showing something interesting in 2 minutes.
3. Maintain a strong bias to showing working stuff. To avoid it being a status report. Demos of working software, user research sessions, changes in policy or processes — these made a bigger impact and people remembered them better.
4. Milling around afterwards is encouraged. The showcase built moments of connection between people and teams, we wanted people to immediately build on those moments. We made sure the showcase happened towards the end of the day and chose a space designed for people to have impromptu conversations afterwards.
5. Every team member is encouraged to present. Product managers, software engineers, testers, delivery managers , researchers, designers — we wanted people to own their contribution and present their successes, problems and learning. We also introduced every new person joining the organisation and got them to stand near the front and wave.
6. Every week, everyone who presented attends a retro, immediately after the session. We used this to tackle pain points with the AV setup, timings, handovers and more. We regularly debated whether the format and content were meeting the needs of the people that attended and made changes when we felt things were going off track.

The showcase played an essential role in keeping people aware of what was going on with other teams. My role running the platform team meant I needed to have some awareness of what is going on with other teams — will they need some help launching a new feature? Are they new to the platform and maybe not making the most of it? Will they be giving me a headache soon? It is hard to keep track of what is going on with 20 teams, this made it a bit easier.

Almost always I came away with a series of small things on my radar that I could get my team to go and investigate. I’d chat with my team members who were there: “You know when that team said they were using a graph database, where is that graph database? Have they thought about how it is going to work in production? Let’s set up a session to go through it with them.” I’d catch people in the room afterwards. I saw this happen over and over with all sorts of teams: “You’re going to send a bunch of emails? So are we. Let’s work it out together…”

This wasn’t the only way we communicated things, and it certainly wasn’t the only way we kept people informed of breaking changes or big impactful events. It was an incredibly useful heartbeat for stepping out of your world and remembering to care about what other people were doing.

This is an essay that was published in Public Digital’s Signals 2 periodical (“Conditions for Success”). It’s fallen off the internet so I’m republishing here.

The New York Times mapped every building in America. Children of immigrants are taking over their family restaurants and it is hard, and sometimes exciting. By answering some questions you can choose a better decision making strategy for the type of decision you are making. How do we know when something is done? Barry Jenkins talks film-making with Roy Williams and Greta Gerwig (podcast). Jessie Frazelle, one of the outstanding software engineers of her generation, tries out some other jobs. If you didn’t know about Doing Presentations—the guide to effective presentations—well now you do and it’s got better. Good tips on making your writing sample stand out when you apply to an MFA degree. Critical reviews of fonts. How machine learning language analysis marks out African American Vernacular language as toxic. What employees say leaders should do to build trust. What a sauce man is and why we should all be looking to be with one. How USA Gymnastics is still struggling to come to terms with the Larry Nasser scandal. Three professionals playing a hundred kids at football (video). Listening to rap from a bunch of different countries.

That was fun. Maybe I’ll do it that way again.

Books

• Transit by Rachel Cusk — I’m reading the trilogy and marvelling at Cusk’s spare writing, her storytelling through the withdrawn narrator letting the other characters form the foreground whilst she emerges from the gaps in their stories. A new writing.
• Chasm by Dorothea Tanning — picked this up at the Tate Modern when I didn’t have anything with me to read. Gothic, haunting, makes you feel queasy at times, great descriptions of the arid, empty desert and the odd people that inhabit it.
• Fates and furies by Lauren Groff — didn’t hugely enjoy it, though well written. The two main characters were too white and privileged for me. Even their issues were masked by their easy access to money and brilliance—at every turn where there was something raw and painful, they were either wealthy enough or brilliant enough to make it go away. Perhaps another way of saying it was that they were implausibly lucky/skillful; one is failing at being an actor, falls asleep and becomes a brilliant playwright. Didn’t buy it.
• Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McCrystal et al. — very good. Like a history of my time at HMRC, and made me think about the areas to I want to grow in workwise.

Articles

• The Oil-Pumping Adventures of Rachael Van Horn by Ian Frazier — superb story of an ex-Army vet with PTSD who works the oil rigs in Oklahoma.

So here are some things I read in January and February. I’ll mainly keep it to books and longer bits of writing (that I’ve enjoyed in the latter case). I’m a subscriber to the New Yorker magazine so that will turn up quite a lot (and I was going through quite a big backlog in Feb!).

January 2019

Books

• Play it again by Alan Rusbridger — good read, lots of interesting musing on the theme of learning later in life. Found the Guardian stuff a little less interesting. Too much name dropping and self importance at times.
• There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker — some absolute cracking poems in here, but uneven.
• asymmetry by Lisa Halliday — deeply frustrating. Pretty well written novel, albeit forced in places but the whole schtick around the “surprise” at the end and the “groundbreaking” modernist structure left me absolutely baffled and feeling stupid.
• The little virtues by Natalia Ginzburg — brilliant, thoughtful, lots of messages that I am quoting in life all the time. A keeper. My vocation and The little virtues are essays for the ages.

Articles

• Why Doctors Hate Their Computers by Atul Gawande

February 2019

Books

• The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon — I think that if I’d read this when I was 18 it would be one of my favourite novels. These days I like my emotions a little more intimate. But a lot of fun and some really moving parts amongst the grandiose. Lots of great new words in there too.

Articles

• The Family Business That Put Nashville Hot Chicken On The Map by Paige Williams — this and the “French Burglar” article below remind me why I subscribe to the New Yorker, utterly original writing that gives you a view of people you will never meet.
• The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives by Robert Caro — Robert Caro is one of my top two or three writers. His commitment to his LBJ project is unprecedented. He’s also a great storyteller.
• The French Burglar Who Pulled Off His Generation’s Biggest Art Heist by Jake Halpern
• The Philosopher Redefining Equality by Nathan Heller
• China’s Bizarre Program to Keep Activists in Check by Jianying Zha
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus Acts Out by Ariel Levy
• Everything in the Dec, 3 issue that republished archive stories about New York, but particularly James Baldwin, Nancy Franklin and Dawn Powell.