First, there’s this note on Conway’s Law (“You ship your org chart”):

The original wording from Melvin Conway goes: “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication system.”...

Think about any complex product you like – it could be your phone, your car, a public transit system; whatever. That product is composed of many different parts, and sub parts, all the way down to tiny little atomic units that feel like indivisible “chunks” of product. Conway’s law is an observation about the contours of those chunks of product....boundaries between chunks of product mirror communication boundaries inside the org.

Then there’s this point about software saturation:

there is so much software...I forget who said this – someone smart on Twitter – but your mental idea of the software business changes when you realize that the primary customer of software is becoming other software.

This stuck out to me because just a couple days before I had seen GitLab’s “Tech Stack Details” where they openly enumerate (all?) of the software they use. The list is huge, over 160 pieces of software.

A nice articulate piece on craft and culture.

Linux proved that there is no upper limit to how much value you could extract out of a message board or email list, if you got the social dynamics right. The internet made it easy for craft practitioners to find one another, fraternize and argue over methods and best practices, almost like artists. The fact that none of these people had ever met in person, or had any shared culture or life experience, made zero difference. Their craft was their shared culture.

I suspect that within a few years, we (and others) will go through a complete rethink of how hiring works, that’s re-oriented around craft: how do we celebrate it, how do we communicate the ways that we celebrate it, how do we find people who crave celebration of that very specific thing, and then how do we hire them, wherever they are?

Craft is culture. If you care about craft, you’ve done the hard part.