While I am only about a hundred pages in, I can say already that it violates several of my rules for reading novels:

1. Don’t read novels by white guys in their late twenties and early thirties, especially if they live in Brooklyn.
2. Don’t read novels in which the main character is a struggling author.
3. Don’t read novels in which the author does not use quotation marks for the dialogue.

Cole is a white guy who looks to be in his late twenties or early thirties and the book jacket says he lives in Brooklyn. The main character that narrates the book is an aspiring author who moves in to his elderly grandfather’s basement after loosing his job, and there is nary a quotation mark to be found, despite long passages that are nothing but several characters talking to one another.

That all sounds bad and is normally the sort of thing that would completely put me off a book. Life is, after all, too short to waste time with bad fiction.

What’s crazy is that—so far, at least—I am really liking Groundskeeping. Cole puts words together quite well, and characters with whom I feel like I should be annoyed are interesting and engaging.

Given the I am skeptical that he will be able to keep me engaged for the entire book, but I am already past the point when I have usually decided whether to abandon or stick with a novel and I remain cautiously optimistic.

Given that coordination and communication swamp all other costs in modern software development it is a pressing area to invest in, especially as your team scales.

I use a framework of a Small Number of Well Known Tools to build shared understanding in our complex systems over time. When we want to do something other than use the Small Number of Well Known Tools (in the small number of well known patterns), that’s a Departure.

This advice and the questions that follow (go read the full post!) are great, and everyone would do well to keep them in mind.

The intended audience would seem to be technology teams and organizations, but I’m also thinking of the internal dialogue I have whenever I read about some new note-taking app or productivity workflow. Am I interested in this thing because it will actually help me, or because it is new and different? Is it really going to solve any problems or make things better for me, or would it be change for its own sake?

These days, I find that the conclusion I come to is that the tools and processes I’ve got work pretty well for me.

More broadly, tools and technology are not solutions to problems. Maybe a particular tool will help you get to the solution, but maybe it won’t. Maybe it will make the problem worse, or distract you from the solution you’re trying to find.

Two-cycle engines should be banned, and property owners need to stop expecting the manicured look that requires the blowing away of all the clippings.

This album is really good, and I do not listen to it often enough.

A majority of Americans have contracted the novel coronavirus since it began to spread in the United States in early 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Experts hope that studying people who have avoided infection may offer clues — perhaps hidden in their genes — that could prevent others from being infected or more effectively treat those who contract the virus.

“What we are looking for is potentially very rare genetic variants with a very big impact on the individual,” said András Spaan, a clinical microbiologist and fellow at the Rockefeller University in New York who is spearheading a search for genetic material responsible for coronavirus resistance.

Or maybe—and I know this will sound crazy, but hear me out—masks, distancing, and other basic precautions are actually pretty effective.