It’s the July edition, ready and hot off the press. Edmonton has had its wettest summer on record with more storms on the horizon. I’ll take it over wildfires, which are somehow decreasing globally. Some great news to cheer up your day! Let’s jump into some links.

1. John Cleese’s Legendary 1991 Speech About Creativity (Video, 35 mins)

In this video, John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, talks about the importance of creativity in management. Looking back, he made some great points that still resonate today. He mentions open vs closed mode thinking, which reminds me of Barbara Oakley’s Learning How to Learn talk. The one that struck home for me was not sticking through creative discomfort long enough. Sometimes it takes a bit more time for your ideas to percolate. Which I think about a lot when it comes to using coding agents.

Fun Fact: The Python programming language is derived from Monty Python.

2. I was laid off by Atlassian (Video, 40 mins)

Vasilios Syrakis is an engineer who was laid off by Atlassian back in March. But instead of diving into job hunting, he made a video talking about everything his work. I loved this because the idea is great, but also because Vasilios was a fellow platform engineer. He walks you through all the moving parts of what you need to build an internal platform for developers. It’s like a high level Platform Engineering 101 video, super fun watch.

3. What I Learned About Wealthy People as a Private Banker (15 mins)

This isn’t about Software Engineering, but it had me hooked. Elizabeth George is a retired Wall Street banker who talks about what she saw amongst the wealthy accounts she managed. It doesn’t seem like having lots of money means you have it all figured out, or can stick to a budget. One quote that stood out was:

Wealth does not alleviate money anxiety; in fact it can exacerbate it.

Something to keep in mind while we’re all on our grinds.

4. Resources for Staff-plus engineers (7 mins)

Will Larson is one of the main people responsible for the proliferation of the term Staff Engineer. I mean, he wrote the Staff Engineer book. He also has a blog and webpage, along with this absolute gold mine of reference materials. There’s links to all the books, papers, and videos you could ever need. If you’re looking for some new material to devour, I don’t think you’ll find a better place.

5. Banned Book Library (40 mins)

This is a long post, but this project is so cool it’s hard not to follow along. Rick Osgood walks through taking a WiFi smart light bulb and hosting banned books on it. I mean, come on, that’s easily the coolest sounding project I’ve heard of in a long time. He walks through all the hardware and software in extreme detail. In the end, the device was limited to only 4MB, which isn’t much if you’re trying to host books. But being able to pull the whole thing off is mighty impressive.

6. Moving beyond fork() + exec() (8 mins)

This post is short with ample opportunity to go down some technical rabbit holes. It summarizes an RFC proposal by Li Chen to introduce Spawn templates. Mainly to help with agent runtimes that make repeated calls to tools such as rg, git, or python. He theorizes that holding certain tools hot would help with performance. Ultimately the proposal was not accepted, but it may have opened a path to some new innovations.