Forest for the trees

- Reading time: ~1 minute

Flickr's legendary 2009 presentation, “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr,” helped popularise what would become the DevOps movement.

It showed how automation, collaboration, and shared responsibility enabled frequent, safe deployments. The goal was not deployment frequency itself, but making software delivery routine rather than a high-risk event.

The irony is that instead of embracing the lessons of Flickr's engineering system, we often celebrated and accentuated the activity inside it.

I believe something similar is happening with AI agents today. We are once again mistaking the visible metric for the underlying achievement: counting agents instead of measuring the value they actually deliver.

Culture as a filter

- Reading time: ~1 minute

Culture is a filter.

People pass through it according to its properties like what it allows, what it tolerates, and what it rejects.

The people who remain are disproportionately those whose traits are compatible with that culture.

For example, a culture promoting blame-game, filters for people who are good at blaming, while people who take ownership may be filtered out.

So many moving parts...

- Reading time: ~1 minute

In the (Public) Cloud, when it rains, it pours.

Triaging when you have multiple high priorities

- Reading time: ~1 minute

Why is there a waiting room in a hospital's emergency department?

Because not everything is an emergency and some cases can wait.

Triage separates the signal from the noise and makes sure the most critical cases get attention first.

The next time your manager drops three 'urgent' tasks on your desk at the same time, remember not everything urgent is actually urgent.

If you cant be bothered writing it, I cant be bothered reading it

- Reading time: ~1 minute

Received a farewell message on company email today that was totally written and polished by AI.

Why would you not translate your emotions in words yourself, why would you outsource your voice to AI, is beyond me.

I don't want the most polished farewell message. I would prefer the most genuine one.

Communication is first and foremost getting message across...

- Reading time: ~1 minute

"Let's align on the desired outcomes before we engage stakeholders across all touchpoints to maximize value creation."

I thought communication was about getting your message across, not making it sound more impressive.

Heard someone say this

- Reading time: ~1 minute

"I'm so happy it's Friday!"

When did our most precious commodity become a liability?

UAE Job Market

- Reading time: ~1 minute

Not an absolute truth obviously but I see it hold true in most instances