Industry News

Mike Fisher argues that we should rebrand technical debt as “product debt”, and I think it’s a good argument! That said, I’d like to add some considerations to two of his points. First:

We usually think of refactoring as “cleaning up” code, where we change the code to be more easily understood, perform better (faster or more efficiently), or follow current conventions/standards. The goal of refactoring is to change the code without changing its functionality; it should continue to...

Google, at about 5pm ET last night on February 21, 2023, has unleashed the sixth product reviews update. This is named the February 2023 product reviews update and it expands to several more languages in addition to just English.

A major quality improvement should be coming to the new Bing AI Chat feature on Thursday, February 23rd said Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Advertising and Web Services at Microsoft.

Every product, every feature even, serves a function in your business. It has one of three jobs: Acquire new users or customers Retain those users or customers Expand engagement or revenue per user or customer

— Frank Tisellano, The Cynical PM Framework, a business-first approach to product.

Underwater Photographer of the Year—2023 Winners. These are so great.

Impostered. Great post from Mandy Brown about the need to reframe how we think about imposter syndrome. “I’ve started to think less about imposter syndrome (a description of a person’s experience with it) and more about being impostered (a framing that draws attention to the systems and structures that lead people to believe they are imposters). While the former framing remains useful in many contexts, the latter...

This afternoon I was messing around with the site and decided to try an upgrade from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.1 and boy oh boy was that a terrible mistake. I use an ancient, unsupported plugin to be able to write in Markdown like this and I guess it doesn’t work with PHP 8.1 so the entire site got borked. I couldn’t even log into the WordPress admin panel.

Anyway, DreamHost support came to the rescue, and now I’m writing this dumb post on a Saturday night as a way to kick the RSS feed back to...

This is a great post by Chase Warrington for the Twist Async newsletter on How to build human connections in an async workplace. They make this really important point about what human connection is actually about on a remote team:

I’ve come to realize that team culture and human connection is primarily built by how you work together—not how you socialize together. […]

The work we do is what actually brings us together. That’s ok (and frankly healthy) to admit. One of the...

Mehul Kar says he’s not super excited about the “fediverse” in the context of social media. However, he sees a huge need for The Fediverse At Work. The issue? The lack of integration across all the tools we use at work has become incredibly tedious and hard to keep track of:

Sometimes there are Figma design specs, with their own set of comments. And Loom walkthroughs, also with comments and likes. And any number of other things over time. The combinatorial complexity of these tools...

AMEN by Jessica Hilltout. “The aim of AMEN was to shine the light on all those in the shadow of the World Cup, far from the big stadiums and the corporate carnival-nature of the event. To embrace Africa and everything that makes it unique. To speak of the authenticity and sheer ingenuousness of a continent that manages to do so much with so little. To capture people with simple needs and huge hearts. To express football in its purest form.” [jessicahilltout.com]

God Did the World a...

Here we go again; yet another Google search ranking algorithm update seems to have touched down on February 14th, maybe as early as February 13th, and seems to be continuing to shake things up throughout today. We previously covered unconfirmed updates on the 8th/9th and also the 4th.