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▶️ The first thing someone does in a podcast app is add some podcasts, and most active Overcast users add at least two new podcasts each month. Over 80% of podcasts are added to Overcast by searching, with the vast majority as searches for a specific podcast by name (rather than searching for generic keywords, such as “business”). Good search is a critical, differentiating feature of any podcast app. I’m not satisfied if the podcast you’re looking for is somewhere in the middle of a long list — I want it to be the first one, displayed quickly, after typing the fewest characters possible. I’ve been building toward this by analyzing years of popularity statistics and anonymous search data. Instant Search is the next step in Overcast’s search evolution. It combines a small local cache with a highly optimized search service to give the most relevant results immediately as you type, even after only a single letter.1 It’s a dramatic, delightful improvement to a critical, frequently used...
over a year ago

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More from Marco.org

Ten years of Overcast: A new foundation

Today, on the tenth anniversary of Overcast 1.0, I’m happy to launch a complete rewrite and redesign of most of the iOS app, built to carry Overcast into the next decade — and hopefully beyond. Like podcasts better than blog posts? Listen to ATP #596 for more! What’s new Much faster, more responsive, more reliable, and more accessible. Modern design, optimized for easily-reached controls on today’s phone sizes. Improvements throughout, such as undoing large seeks, new playlist-priority options, easier navigation, and more. What’s not Most features. Overcast is still Overcast! The audio engine. It’s the best part of Overcast, and still leads the industry in sound quality, silence skipping, and volume normalization. (More soon!) The business. I’m still a one-person operation, with no funding or external ownership, serving only my customers. My principles. I always want to make the best podcast app, and I’ll never disrespect your time, attention, or privacy. What’s gone Streaming. Most big podcasts now use dynamic ad insertion, which causes bugs and problems for streaming playback.1 Downloading episodes completely before they begin playback is much more reliable. Tapping a non-downloading episode will now open the playback screen, download it, then start playback. It works similarly to the way streaming did before, but playback begins after the download completes, not after a portion of it is buffered. On today’s fast networks, this usually only takes a few extra seconds. And in the near future, I’ll be adding smarter options and more control over selective downloading of episodes to further improve the experience for people who don’t automatically download every episode. What’s next The last few missing features from the old app, such as Shortcuts support, storage management, and OPML. These are absent now, but will return soon. More options for downloading and deleting episodes. Upgrading the Apple Watch app to the new, faster sync engine. (The Watch app is currently unchanged from the previous one.) And, of course, more features, including some of your most-requested features over the last decade. Getting this rewrite out the door was a monumental task. Thank you for your patience as I work through this list! Why? Most of Overcast’s core code was 10 years old, which made it cumbersome or impossible to easily move with the times, adopt new iOS functionality, or add new features, especially as one person. That’s why there haven’t been many new features or changes in years. You saw it, and I saw it. I wasn’t able to serve my customers as well as I wanted. For Overcast to have a future, it needed a modern foundation for its second decade. I’ve spent the past 18 months rebuilding most of the app with Swift, SwiftUI, Blackbird, and modern Swift concurrency. Now, development is rapidly accelerating. I’m more responsive, iterating more quickly, and ultimately making the app much better. Thank you all so much for the first decade of Overcast. Here’s to the next one. Dynamic ad insertion (DAI) splices ads into each download, and no two downloads are guaranteed to have the same number or duration of ads. So, for example, if the first half of an episode downloads, then the download fails, and it downloads the second half with another request, the combined audio may jump forward or back at the halfway mark, losing or repeating content. ↩︎

8 months ago 63 votes
The Overcast Redesign: Part One

Overcast’s latest update (2022.2) brings the largest redesign in its nearly-eight-year history, plus many of the most frequently requested features and lots of under-the-hood improvements. I’m pretty proud of this one. For this first and largest phase of the redesign, I focused on the home screen, playlist screen, typography, and spacing. (I plan to revamp the now-playing and individual-podcast screens in a later update.) The home screen is radically different: Home screen, before (left) and after (right). Playlists now have strong visual identities for nicer and easier navigation. Each playlist has a customizable color, and a custom icon can be selected from over 3,000 SF Symbols to match modern iOS design and the other icons within Overcast. And playlists can be manually reordered with drag-and-drop. Recently played and newly published episodes can now be displayed on the home screen for quick access, much like the widget and CarPlay experience. Podcasts can now be pinned to the top of the home-screen list. Pinned podcasts can also be manually reordered with drag-and-drop. I’ve also rethought the old stacked “Podcasts” and “Played Podcasts” sections to better match people’s needs and expectations. Now, the toggle atop the podcast list switches between three modes: podcasts with current episodes, all followed podcasts, and inactive podcasts (those that you don’t follow and therefore won’t get any more episodes from, or haven’t posted a new episode in a long time). The playlist screen’s structure remains mostly the same, while refining the design for the modern era: Playlist screen, before (left) and after (right). Here, it’s more apparent that I’ve replaced the system San Francisco font with an alternate variant, San Francisco Rounded, to increase legibility and better match the personality of the app. I’ve also added highly demanded features: By far, Overcast’s most-requested feature is a Mark as Played feature. That’s now available as a checkmark button on episode rows, as well as a left-side swipe action. The second-most-requested feature is a way to view all starred episodes. Special playlists for Starred, Downloaded, and In Progress can now be created. The light and dark themes now each have a customizable tint color from the modern iOS UI-color palette, including these favorites from beta testers: And throughout the app, I’ve made tons of tweaks and bug fixes, including: Notifications and background downloads are now much more reliable. Episode downloads can now be individually deleted or re-downloaded. Links can now be opened in Safari. (under Nitpicky Details) Performance is now significantly better with very large playlists and collections. Fixed bugs with episode-duration detection, CarPlay lists, Mac-app sharing, and much more. So much is better in this update that I can’t even remember it all. Thank you so much to everyone who helped me beta-test this massive update. As always, Overcast is free in the App Store. Go get it!

over a year ago 33 votes
Ten years after we lost Steve Jobs

Losing Steve affected me more than it probably should have, given that I never met him or had any correspondence with him. But losing him was devastating — not just to my world, but the world. He was a sort of virtual father figure: I was always hoping that maybe Steve would notice something I did. We all wanted his attention and approval, and that drove us to do better work — even those of us who never worked at Apple. Nobody replaced him in this role. Nobody can. But as an outsider who had no personal relationship with him to mourn, it has been most depressing to consider how much of his work the world missed out on. He wasn’t taken from us after a long, complete life — he was taken in his prime. He had so much more to offer the world.

over a year ago 33 votes
The future of the App Store

After the dust settles from the developer class-action settlement, the South Korean law, the JFTC announcement, and the Apple v. Epic decision, I think the most likely long-term outcome isn’t very different from the status quo — and that’s a good thing. Allowing external purchases Here’s what I think we’ll end up with: Apple will still require apps to use their IAP system for any qualifying purchases that occur in the apps themselves. All app types will be allowed to link out to a browser for other purchase methods. Most apps will be required to also offer IAP side-by-side with any external methods.1 Only “Reader apps” will be exempt from this requirement.2 Apple will have many rules regarding the display, descriptions, and behavior of external purchases, many of which will be unpublished and ever-changing. App Review will be extremely harsh, inconsistent, capricious, petty, and punitive with their enforcement.3 Apple won’t require price-matching between IAP and external purchases. These few but important corrections reduce Apple’s worst behavior and should relieve most regulatory pressure. The result won’t look much different than the status quo: Most big media apps (qualifying as “reader” apps) won’t offer IAP, but will finally be allowed to link to their websites from their apps and offer purchases there. Many games will offer both IAP and external purchases, with the external choice offering a discount, bonus gems, extra loot boxes, or other manipulative tricks to optimize the profitability of casino games for children (commissions from which have been the largest portion of Apple’s “services revenue” to date). Most importantly, many products, services, and business models will become possible that previously weren’t, leading to more apps, more competition, and more money going to more places. External purchase methods will evolve to be almost as convenient as IAP (especially if Apple Pay is permitted in this context), and payment processors will reduce the burden of manual credit-card entry with shared credentials available across multiple apps. The payment-fraud doomsday scenarios argued by Apple and many fans mostly won’t happen, in part because App Review will prevent most obvious cases, but also because parents don’t typically offer their credit cards to untrustworthy children; and for buyers of all ages, most credit cards themselves provide stronger fraud prevention and easier recourse from unwanted charges than the App Store ever has. No side-loading I don’t expect side-loading or alternative app stores to become possible, and I’m relieved, because that is not a future I want for iOS. When evaluating such ideas, I merely ask myself: “What would Facebook do?” Facebook owns four of the top ten apps in the world. If side-loading became possible, Facebook could remove Instagram, WhatsApp, the Facebook app, and Messenger from Apple’s App Store, requiring customers to install these extremely popular apps directly from Facebook via side-loading. And everyone would. Most people use a Facebook-owned app not because it’s a good app, but because it’s a means to an important end in their life. Social pressure, family pressure, and network lock-in prevent most users from seeking meaningful alternatives. People would jump through a few hoops if they had to. Facebook would soon have apps that bypassed App Review installed on the majority of iPhones in the world. Technical limitations of the OS would prevent the most egregious abuses, but there’s a lot they could still do. We don’t need to do much imagining — they already have attempted multiple hacks, workarounds, privacy invasions, and other unscrupulous and technically invasive behavior with their apps over time to surveil user behavior outside of their app and stay running longer in the background than users intend or expect. The OS could evolve over time to reduce some of these vulnerabilities, but technical measures alone cannot address all of them. Without the threat of App Review to keep them in check, Facebook’s apps would become even more monstrous than they already are. As a user and a fan of iOS, I don’t want any part of that. No alternative app stores Alternative app stores would be even worse. Rather than offering individual apps via side-loading, Facebook could offer just one: The Facebook App Store. Instagram, WhatsApp, the Facebook app, and Messenger could all be available exclusively there. The majority of iOS users in the world would soon install it, and Facebook would start using leverage in other areas — apps’ social accounts, stats packages, app-install ads, ad-attribution requirements — to heavily incentivize (and likely strong-arm) a huge number of developers to offer their apps in the Facebook App Store, likely in addition to Apple’s. Maybe I’d be required to add the Facebook SDK to my app in order to be in their store, which they would then use to surveil my users. Maybe I’d need to buy app-install ads to show up in search there at all. Maybe I’d need to pay Facebook to “promote” each app update to reach more than a tiny percentage of my existing customers. And Facebook wouldn’t even be the only app store likely to become a large player on iOS. Amazon would almost certainly bring their garbage “Appstore” to iOS, but at least that one probably wouldn’t go anywhere. Maybe Google would bring the Play Store to iOS and offer a unified SDK to develop a single codebase for iOS and Android, effectively making every app feel like an Android app and further marginalizing native apps when they’re already hurting. Media conglomerates that own many big-name properties, like Disney, might each have their own app stores for their high-profile apps. Running your own store means you can promote all of your own apps as much as you want. What giant corporation would resist? Don’t forget games! Epic and Steam would come to iOS with their own game stores. Maybe Microsoft and Nintendo, too. Maybe you’d need to install seven different app stores on your iPhone just to get the apps and games you already use — and all without App Review to keep them in check. Most developers would probably need to start submitting our apps to multiple app stores, each with its own rules, metadata, technical requirements, capabilities, approval delays, payment processing, stats, crash reports, ads, promotion methods, and user reviews. As a user, a multiple-app-store world sounds like an annoying mess; as a developer, it terrifies me. Apple’s App Store is the devil we know. The most viable alternatives that would crop up would be far worse. Course correction The way Apple runs its business isn’t perfect, but it’s also not a democracy. I loved this part of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ decision in Apple v. Epic, as quoted by Ben Thompson’s excellent article that you should read: Apple has not offered any justification for the actions other than to argue entitlement. Where its actions harm competition and result in supracompetitive pricing and profits, Apple is wrong. I interpret “entitlement” without a negative connotation here — Apple is entitled to run their platform mostly as they wish, with governmental interference only warranted to fix market-scale issues that harm large segments of commerce or society. As a developer, I’d love to see more changes to Apple’s control over iOS. But it’s hard to make larger changes without potentially harming much of what makes iOS great for both users and developers. Judge Gonzalez Rogers got it right: we needed a minor course correction to address the most egregiously anticompetitive behavior, but most of the way Apple runs iOS is best left to Apple. If the South Korean law holds, IAP may not be required — but only in South Korea. With this exception, I expect the rest of these rules to be enforced the same way globally. ↩︎ Apple defines “reader” apps as “[allowing] a user to access previously purchased content or content subscriptions (specifically: magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video).” This includes many apps that Apple’s services compete with, such as Netflix, Spotify, and Kindle, that raise anticompetitive concerns among regulators and legislators when forced to give Apple 30%. ↩︎ App Review has higher-level queues for managerial review of controversial rules or edge cases, typically identifiable from the outside by an app stuck with “In Review” status for days or weeks, and often ending in a phone call from “Bill”. I’d expect any app offering external purchases to have a very high chance of being escalated to a slower, more pain-in-the-ass review process, possibly causing it not to be worthwhile for most small developers to deal with. I have no plans to add external purchases to Overcast for multiple reasons, including this — but mostly because, for my purposes, I’m satisfied with Apple’s IAP system. ↩︎

over a year ago 31 votes
Developer relations

Apple’s leaders continue to deny developers of two obvious truths: That our apps provide substantial value to iOS beyond the purchase commissions collected by Apple. That any portion of our customers came to our apps from our own marketing or reputation, rather than the App Store. For Apple to continue to deny these is dishonest, factually wrong, and extremely insulting — not only to our efforts, but to the intelligence of all Apple developers and customers. This isn’t about the 30%, or the 15%, or the prohibition of other payment systems, or the rules against telling our customers about our websites, or Apple’s many other restrictions. (Not today, at least.) It’s about what Apple’s leadership thinks of us and our work. *     *     * It isn’t the App Store’s responsibility to the rest of Apple to “pay its way” by leveraging hefty fees on certain types of transactions. Modern society has come to rely so heavily on mobile apps that any phone manufacturer must ensure that such a healthy ecosystem exists as table stakes for anyone to buy their phones. Without our apps, the iPhone has little value to most of its customers today. If Apple wishes to continue advancing bizarre corporate-accounting arguments, the massive profits from the hardware business are what therefore truly “pay the way” of the App Store, public APIs, developer tools, and other app-development resources, just as the hardware profits must fund the development of Apple’s own hardware, software, and services that make the iPhone appeal to customers. The forced App Store commissions, annual developer fees, and App Store Search Ads income are all just gravy. The “way” is already paid by the hardware — but Apple uses their position of power to double-dip. And that’s just business. Apple’s a lot of things, and “generous” isn’t one. But to bully and gaslight developers into thinking that we need to be kissing Apple’s feet for permitting us to add billions of dollars of value to their platform is not only greedy, stingy, and morally reprehensible, but deeply insulting. *     *     * Apple further extends the value argument, and defends their justification for forced commissions, by claiming responsibility for and ownership of the customer relationship between all iOS users and each app they choose to use. This argument only makes sense — and even then, only somewhat — when apps are installed by a customer browsing the App Store, finding an app they hadn’t previously heard of, and choosing to install it based on App Store influence alone. But in the common case — and for most app installations, the much more common case — of searching for a specific app by name or following a link or ad based on its developer’s own marketing or reputation, Apple has served no meaningful role in the customer acquisition and “deserves” nothing more from the transaction than what a CDN and commodity credit-card processor would charge. The idea that the App Store is responsible for most customers of any reasonably well-known app is a fantasy. It isn’t the App Store that has enabled all of the commerce on iOS — it’s the entire world of computing and modern society, created by a symbiotic ecosystem in which Apple played one part alongside many others. The world was already moving in this direction, and had Apple not played its part, someone else would’ve. The App Store is merely one platform’s forced distribution gateway, “facilitating” the commerce no more and no less than a web browser, an ISP or cellular carrier, a server-hosting company, or a credit-card processor. For Apple to continue to claim otherwise is beyond insulting, and borders on delusion. *     *     * At WWDC next week, these same people are going to try to tell us a different story. They’re going to tell us how amazing we are, how important our work is, and how much they value us. And for thousands of Apple employees who’ve made the great products and platforms that we love, including the hundreds of engineers presenting the sessions and working the labs, it’ll be genuine and true. But the leaders have already shown us who they really are, what they really think of us, and how much they value our work. Please forgive some sloppiness in my metaphors or phrasing — my writing skills are pretty rusty — and I’ll return the favor to anyone who responds.

over a year ago 34 votes

More in programming

How to use “real” UART

I recently went into a deep dive on “UART” and will publish a much longer article on the topic. This is just a recap of the basics to help put things in context. Many tutorials focus on using UART over USB, which adds many layers of abstraction, hiding what it actually is. Here, I deliberately … Continue reading How to use “real” UART → The post How to use “real” UART appeared first on Quentin Santos.

9 hours ago 2 votes
How to get better at strategy?

One of the most memorable quotes in Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman comes from Uncle Ben, who describes his path to becoming wealthy as, “When I was seventeen, I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich.” I wish I could describe the path to learning engineering strategy in similar terms, but by all accounts it’s a much slower path. Two decades in, I am still learning more from each project I work on. This book has aimed to accelerate your learning path, but my experience is that there’s still a great deal left to learn, despite what this book has hoped to accomplish. This final chapter is focused on the remaining advice I have to give on how you can continue to improve at strategy long after reading this book’s final page. Inescapably, this chapter has become advice on writing your own strategy for improving at strategy. You are already familiar with my general suggestions on creating strategy, so this chapter provides focused advice on creating your own plan to get better at strategy. It covers: Exploring strategy creation to find strategies you can learn from via public and private resources, and through creating learning communities How to diagnose the strategies you’ve found, to ensure you learn the right lessons from each one Policies that will help you find ways to perform and practice strategy within your organization, whether or not you have organizational authority Operational mechanisms to hold yourself accountable to developing a strategy practice My final benediction to you as a strategy practitioner who has finished reading this book With that preamble, let’s write this book’s final strategy: your personal strategy for developing your strategy practice. This is an exploratory, draft chapter for a book on engineering strategy that I’m brainstorming in #eng-strategy-book. As such, some of the links go to other draft chapters, both published drafts and very early, unpublished drafts. Exploring strategy creation Ideally, we’d start our exploration of how to improve at engineering strategy by reading broadly from the many publicly available examples. Unfortunately, there simply aren’t many easily available works to learn from others’ experience. Nonetheless, resources do exist, and we’ll discuss the three categories that I’ve found most useful: Public resources on engineering strategy, such as companies’ engineering blogs Private and undocumented strategies available through your professional network Learning communities that you build together, including ongoing learning circles Each of these is explored in its own section below. Public resources While there aren’t as many public engineering strategy resources as I’d like, I’ve found that there are still a reasonable number available. This book collects a number of such resources in the appendix of engineering strategy resources. That appendix also includes some individuals’ blog posts that are adjacent to this topic. You can go a long way by searching and prompting your way into these resources. As you read them, it’s important to recognize that public strategies are often misleading, as discussed previously in evaluating strategies. Everyone writing in public has an agenda, and that agenda often means that they’ll omit important details to make themselves, or their company, come off well. Make sure you read through the lines rather than taking things too literally. Private resources Ironically, where public resources are hard to find, I’ve found it much easier to find privately held strategy resources. While private recollections are still prone to inaccuracies, the incentives to massage the truth are less pronounced. The most useful sources I’ve found are: peers’ stories – strategies are often oral histories, and they are shared freely among peers within and across companies. As you build out your professional network, you can usually get access to any company’s engineering strategy on any topic by just asking. There are brief exceptions. Even a close peer won’t share a sensitive strategy before its existence becomes obvious externally, but they’ll be glad to after it does. People tend to over-estimate how much information companies can keep private anyway: even reading recent job postings can usually expose a surprising amount about a company. internal strategy archaeologists – while surprisingly few companies formally collect their strategies into a repository, the stories are informally collected by the tenured members of the organization. These folks are the company’s strategy archaeologists, and you can learn a great deal by explicitly consulting them becoming a strategy archaeologist yourself – whether or not you’re a tenured member of your company, you can learn a tremendous amount by starting to build your own strategy repository. As you start collecting them, you’ll interest others in contributing their strategies as well. As discussed in Staff Engineer’s section on the Write five then synthesize approach to strategy, over time you can foster a culture of documentation where one didn’t exist before. Even better, building that culture doesn’t require any explicit authority, just an ongoing show of excitement. There are other sources as well, ranging from attending the hallway track in conferences to organizing dinners where stories are shared with a commitment to privacy. Working in community My final suggestion for seeing how others work on strategy is to form a learning circle. I formed a learning circle when I first moved into an executive role, and at this point have been running it for more than five years. What’s surprised me the most is how much I’ve learned from it. There are a few reasons why ongoing learning circles are exceptional for sharing strategy: Bi-directional discussion allows so much more learning and understanding than mono-directional communication like conference talks or documents. Groups allow you to learn from others’ experiences and others’ questions, rather than having to guide the entire learning yourself. Continuity allows you to see the strategy at inception, during the rollout, and after it’s been in practice for some time. Trust is built slowly, and you only get the full details about a problem when you’ve already successfully held trust about smaller things. An ongoing group makes this sort of sharing feasible where a transient group does not. Although putting one of these communities together requires a commitment, they are the best mechanism I’ve found. As a final secret, many people get stuck on how they can get invited to an existing learning circle, but that’s almost always the wrong question to be asking. If you want to join a learning circle, make one. That’s how I got invited to mine. Diagnosing your prior and current strategy work Collecting strategies to learn from is a valuable part of learning. You also have to determine what lessons to learn from each strategy. For example, you have to determine whether Calm’s approach to resourcing Engineering-driven projects is something to copy or something to avoid. What I’ve found effective is to apply the strategy rubric we developed in the “Is this strategy any good?” chapter to each of the strategies you’ve collected. Even by splitting a strategy into its various phases, you’ll learn a lot. Applying the rubric to each phase will teach you more. Each time you do this to another strategy, you’ll get a bit faster at applying the rubric, and you’ll start to see interesting, recurring patterns. As you dig into a strategy that you’ve split into phases and applied the evaluation rubric to, here are a handful of questions that I’ve found interesting to ask myself: How long did it take to determine a strategy’s initial phase could be improved? How high was the cost to fund that initial phase’s discovery? Why did the strategy reach its final stage and get repealed or replaced? How long did that take to get there? If you had to pick only one, did this strategy fail in its approach to exploration, diagnosis, policy or operations? To what extent did the strategy outlive the tenure of its primary author? Did it get repealed quickly after their departure, did it endure, or was it perhaps replaced during their tenure? Would you generally repeat this strategy, or would you strive to avoid repeating it? If you did repeat it, what conditions seem necessary to make it a success? How might you apply this strategy to your current opportunities and challenges? It’s not necessary to work through all of these questions for every strategy you’re learning from. I often try to pick the two that I think might be most interesting for a given strategy. Policy for improving at strategy At a high level, there are just a few key policies to consider for improving your strategic abilities. The first is implementing strategy, and the second is practicing implementing strategy. While those are indeed the starting points, there are a few more detailed options worth consideration: If your company has existing strategies that are not working, debug one and work to fix it. If you lack the authority to work at the company scope, then decrease altitude until you find an altitude you can work at. Perhaps setting Engineering organizational strategies is beyond your circumstances, but strategy for your team is entirely accessible. If your company has no documented strategies, document one to make it debuggable. Again, if operating at a high altitude isn’t attainable for some reason, operate at a lower altitude that is within reach. If your company’s or team’s strategies are effective but have low adoption, see if you can iterate on operational mechanisms to increase adoption. Many such mechanisms require no authority at all, such as low-noise nudges or the model-document-share approach. If existing strategies are effective and have high adoption, see if you can build excitement for a new strategy. Start by mining for which problems Staff-plus engineers and senior managers believe are important. Once you find one, you have a valuable strategy vein to start mining. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing your work internally, then try writing proposals while only sharing them to a few trusted peers. You can even go further to only share proposals with trusted external peers, perhaps within a learning circle that you create or join. Trying all of these at once would be overwhelming, so I recommend picking one in any given phase. If you aren’t able to make traction, then try another until something works. It’s particularly important to recognize in your diagnosis where things are not working–perhaps you simply don’t have the sponsorship you need to enforce strategy so you need to switch towards suggesting strategies instead–and you’ll find something that works. What if you’re not allowed to do strategy? If you’re looking to find one, you’ll always unearth a reason why it’s not possible to do strategy in your current environment. If you’ve convinced yourself that there’s simply no policy that would allow you to do strategy in your current role, then the two most useful levers I’ve found are: Lower your altitude – there’s always a scale where you can perform strategy, even if it’s just your team or even just yourself. Only you can forbid yourself from developing personal strategies. Practice rather than perform – organizations can only absorb so much strategy development at a given time, so sometimes they won’t be open to you doing more strategy. In that case, you should focus on practicing strategy work rather than directly performing it. Only you can stop yourself from practice. Don’t believe the hype: you can always do strategy work. Operating your strategy improvement policies As the refrain goes, even the best policies don’t accomplish much if they aren’t paired with operational mechanisms to ensure the policies actually happen, and debug why they aren’t happening. Although it’s tempting to ignore operations when it comes to our personal habits, I think that would be a mistake: our personal habits have the most significant long-term impact on ourselves, and are the easiest habits to ignore since others generally won’t ask about them. The mechanisms I’d recommend: Explicitly track the strategies that you’ve implemented, refined, documented, or read. This should be in a document, spreadsheet or folder where you can explicitly see if you have or haven’t done the work. Review your tracked strategies every quarter: are you working on the expected number and in the expected way? If not, why not? Ideally, your review should be done in community with a peer or a learning circle. It’s too easy to deceive yourself, it’s much harder to trick someone else. If your periodic review ever discovers that you’re simply not doing the work you expected, sit down for an hour with someone that you trust–ideally someone equally or more experienced than you–and debug what’s going wrong. Commit to doing this before your next periodic review. Tracking your personal habits can feel a bit odd, but it’s something I highly recommend. I’ve been setting and tracking personal goals for some time now—for example, in my 2024 year in review—and have benefited greatly from it. Too busy for strategy Many companies convince themselves that they’re too much in a rush to make good decisions. I’ve certainly gotten stuck in this view at times myself, although at this point in my career I find it increasingly difficult to not recognize that I have a number of tools to create time for strategy, and an obligation to do strategy rather than inflict poor decisions on the organizations I work in. Here’s my advice for creating time: If you’re not tracking how often you’re creating strategies, then start there. If you’ve not worked on a single strategy in the past six months, then start with one. If implementing a strategy has been prohibitively time consuming, then focus on practicing a strategy instead. If you do try all those things and still aren’t making progress, then accept your reality: you don’t view doing strategy as particularly important. Spend some time thinking about why that is, and if you’re comfortable with your answer, then maybe this is a practice you should come back to later. Final words At this point, you’ve read everything I have to offer on drafting engineering strategy. I hope this has refined your view on what strategy can be in your organization, and has given you the tools to draft a more thoughtful future for your corner of the software engineering industry. What I’d never ask is for you to wholly agree with my ideas here. They are my best thinking on this topic, but strategy is a topic where I’m certain Hegel’s world view is the correct one: even the best ideas here are wrong in interesting ways, and will be surpassed by better ones.

14 hours ago 1 votes
Announcing the NNCPNET Email Network

From 1995 to 2019, I ran my own mail server. It began with a UUCP link, an expensive long-distance call for me then. Later, I ran a mail server in my apartment, then ran it as a VPS at various places. But running an email server got difficult. You can’t just run it on a … Continue reading Announcing the NNCPNET Email Network →

yesterday 2 votes
chasing the dragon

Life is a journey meant to be experienced. Today, experience what view transitions have to offer with an honest side by side comparison to the more, exotic options.

yesterday 3 votes
7 best free open source LLM observability tools right now

To build LLM-powered apps, developers need to know how users are using their app. LLM observability tools help them do this by capturing LLM provider…

yesterday 2 votes