Five for Friday – February 21, 2025

It’s been an interesting week (aren’t they all these days?). Here are a few things you may (or may not) like.

• Let’s lead with good news. It was great to see Ash Hunsberger talking with Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin about Developer Experience. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with Ash the last year, and she’s amazing.
• I thought there was a lot of truth in this post on Ugly Code and Dumb Things.
• I worked on a few “science projects” when at Microsoft. One of them was a pet project I took on to make the debug version of consumer windows (win 9x) run. It was neglected throughout windows 98 development, and wouldn’t boot, let alone run (or run efficiently). So – articles like this one on Making my debug build run 100x faster so that it is finally usable warm my heart.
• I read a lot of books, and I love pattern matching. So I adored this article that found patterns between Team Topologies and Deep Work (two books I’ve re-read a few times each).
• Finally – I bought a new watch. Apple watches are cool, but when I’m hiking for a week, I don’t want a watch I need to recharge. I picked up this Garmin Instinct 3 Solar, and it’s fantastic.

And that’s a wrap for this week!