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Since I was small, I’d lived my life through screens, one way or another. For the last quarter-century or so, I had been piloting the machine of flesh and sinew to keep my mind going, rarely engaging with the machine itself. This was a mistake.
A common pattern I’ve seen over the years have been folks in engineering leadership positions that are not super comfortable with extracting and interpreting data from stores, be it databases, CSV files in an object store, or even just a spreadsheet. We’re going to cover SQL & DuckDB, then some useful statistical tools: summary stats, distributions, confidence intervals and Bayesian reasoning.
This post discusses topics some may wish to avoid: terminal illness, hospice care, death, and Japanese visual novels.
I’ve been managing a fully remote, fully distributed team, covering timezones from UTC-8 through UTC+10, for the last couple of years. Through that time, I’ve learned a lot on organising work, interpersonal relationships, and ultimately how to overcome a lack of promximity to my reports.
More in technology
Welcome back to yet another episode of "security was taken seriously". Being who we are (and constantly being exposed to what we see…), we recognize we have been doomed to eternal damnation as we keep on watching security best practices crumble behind “secure by design”
Fellow Automattician Job Thomas, down in Cape Town, South Africa, has a lovely story about using Claude and the Beeper MCP to wrangle all the group chats for his daughter’s sports.
We keep reading scary reports of swarms of AI agents breaking into computer systems and doing other untoward and perhaps illegal things. To what degree do these agents influence each other? And is there anything we can learn from human behavior that would help mitigate these problems? That’s the heady backstory behind [episode 46](https://www.tractionheroes.com/2439976/episodes/19905275-tribal-psychology) of [_Traction Heroes_](https://www.tractionheroes.com/). Harry brought a short reading from David McRaney’s [_How Minds Change_](https://www.amazon.com/How-Minds-Change-Surprising-Persuasion-ebook/dp/B093R2CP2V/) about the impact of our groups on our thinking and behavior. Here’s the key fragment: > the latest evidence coming out of social science is clear. Humans value being good members of their groups much more than they value being right. So much so that as long as the group satisfies those needs, we will choose to be wrong if it keeps us in good standing with our peers. We never lack evidence for this: just tune in to the news. People do stupid things to remain in good standing with their milieu _all the time_. (I know I have!) And apparently, so do AIs. (Although as I pointed out in the show, we mustn’t anthropomorphize technology.) But more importantly, knowing about the perils of tribal psychology can help us be more effective when working in groups — and therefore, to gain traction. [_Traction Heroes episode 46: Tribal Psychology_](https://www.tractionheroes.com/2439976/episodes/19905275-tribal-psychology)
There's a chance, slim as it might be, that things won't go the way the've gone the last 30 years with digitization the moving to rental models for everyhing.
