New issue of the Developer Science Review is out, folks! My article choice and annotation is pretty dang personal for this one, where I ask the question:
"For whom does intellectual humility become disadvantageous?"
Thanks in advance for reading and (I hope!) sharing your thoughts, reactions & experiences.
https://dsl.pubpub.org/pub/intellectual-humility/release/2?readingCollection=818aa986
The results are in! Check out our latest blog post that reports the findings of the #OpenTelemetry Developer Experience Survey.
Thank you to the 218 participants! Your feedback will help improve #OTel #DevEx in key areas, including the documentation, SDKs, and the Collector.
Team #DevProd or #DevEx? The answer isn’t one or the other. Choose the right developer productivity metrics, & it will lead to improved developer experience in the long run (as well as better products in general). It's a balancing act. 
https://bit.ly/4kyvieR @TheNewStack
How to Burn a Million Euros with a Smile
The Modern Art of Over-Engineering
Welcome to tech 2025:
5 frontend buttons.
10 roles.
47 meetings.
€1M/month burn rate.
Still no launch.
"The Product Comes First" Problem
Sounds noble. Humble.
Also turns every role into a background NPC quietly agreeing their job doesn’t matter.
Imagine telling an orchestra:
"Your instrument doesn't matter, the symphony does".
Then the clarinet rage-quits.
Focus is Dead.
Last seen between:
"Can we align real quick?"
and
"Why don't you behave like I want?"
You've replaced deep work with:
Slack pings
Calendar chaos
Agile rituals
1 brain cell split across 8 tools
But the Jira board? Adorable. 
When Nothing Ships:
"Maybe we’re just not Agile enough"
No Karen, the framework didn’t fail.
You did.
With passion.
And six retros.
None of which helped.
What If We Just… Thought?
Build a 10-person “cross-functional” team
→ Burn €1M/month
→ Everyone owns everything, so no one owns anything
→ Meetings breed like rabbits
Meanwhile…
4-person focused teams
~€300K/month
Ship faster Think clearer
Learn and grow Deliver real value
Bonus: They still like each other.
Every time a tech person says:
"Hey, costs? Risks? Waste?"
Management responds:
"That's not your concern, code wizard".
Radical Thought: Let People Think
Let engineers engineer.
Let thinkers think.
Let humans do what they were hired to do.
Wild, I know.
About Unicorns:
Not every engineer is:
DevOps + Infra + Architect + Therapist + Evangelist + Espresso Machine
And that's okay.
Some are introverts.
Some are quiet builders.
Some are fixing prod right now.
Hire for mindset, not magic.
Stop gatekeeping with 1997 brain-teasers in fake conditions.
No AI. No docs. No team. No realism.
This is IT, not Hogwarts.
TL;DR
• Build small, focused teams
• Respect strengths
• Trust your people
• Don’t worship frameworks
• Let engineers engineer
• And stop setting fire to your budget 
You know what's faster than scaling a broken system?
Not breaking it in the first place.
What a friggin wild first quarter I tell you what. As of today lost my boss and his boss so no director of SRE and no VP of TechOps.
I am ... I am in the midst of patterns I have experienced in the past, but in much more high stakes positions. We are under a reorg and I will be honest ... the thing probably saving me from cuts is that I took a low salary. No clue what's to come... except I kinda do have an intuition about it.
I see something happen in the way a CTO handles a shift in power that I have begun to find intuitive because I have witnessed all sides of it so many fucking times. Like I know what they're doing, and I know where they're going next. When things happen, like heads of departments are just gone one day, I have seen this battle before. Ain't my first rodeo, try ain't my tenth.
Hard to tell how things will shake down. Ultimately I think the work we're accomplishing in DevEx is carving out a recognized need that makes my little team's center for excellence work indispensable. I have worked damn hard to forge some bonds there that I could not do elsewhere.
I guess one feeling I have is that I can only go up from here as long as I can hang on. Now that I can get over freaking out about it, I can enjoy the ride instead!
#Cursor #IDE doesn't stop to amaze me. I had an old web scraper in #Python. It stopped working because the scraped website changed. I simply prompted that "it no longer finds the right data". No other details. It:
1. Run a few `curl` commands to analyze how the HTML looks now (!)
2. Adjusted CSS selectors (!!)
3. Run the program to figure out if it now works (it did!!!)
4. But Cursor didn't know that, so it added some print statements for himself, re-run and verify the output (!!!!)
#AI #DevEx
SQS-Admin 0.7.0 is out 
Highlight is
* the decreased #Docker image size from 20MB to 9MB
* app does no longer run as root
Queue management and interaction with #LocalStack made easy.
As a developer, I'm more passionate about optimizing the way people work together, than the way my coded algorithms work, because the prior lies at the heart of 95% of the problems in delivered software, including poorly performing algorithms. #dev #devex #softwaredevelopment
Beyond the Hype: Building Actually Useful Platforms with the CNCF Maturity Model (and a Healthy Dose of Realism) https://blog.eisele.net/2025/02/cncf-platform-engineering-maturity-model-tvp-guide.html
#PlatformEngineering #DevEx #TVP
I was grateful to be asked to give two talks at #DeveloperWeek around #DevEx. Below are the slides for the second talk on some ways to champion DevEx in your organization.
Thank you to those who were part of the packed room for my "Why #DevEx matters" talk at #DeveloperWeek. I had a great time reminiscing with you on where we've come, and where we can go in creating a good #DeveloperExperience.
Here are the slides:
https://speaking.jmeiss.me/FJD6ny/demystifying-devex-and-why-it-matters
DORA, SPACE, DevEx, DX Core 4:
Key metrics of and casual thoughts on four engineering productivity frameworks.
Here's Donnie's AWS Weekly Roundup 
DeepSeek-R1, S3 Metadata, Elastic Beanstalk updates, and more (February 3, 2024)
Amazon EventBridge enhances event source discovery in the console
When you create a rule, The EventBridge console now displays the source and detail type of all available AWS service events. Additionally, the EventBridge documentation now includes an automatically updated list of all AWS service events, facilitating access to the most current information.
Enhancing Code Generation with Real-Time Execution in Amazon Q Developer The /dev agent now runs unit tests and builds the code to verify that is ready for review
#DeveloperWeek is a week from now (Feb 11-13) in Santa Clara, and I'll be speaking on championing a #DevEx revolution in your org (https://sched.co/1tDk7).
And as a speaker I have free event OPEN Passes with access to all Keynotes, OPEN Talks and to the Expo: https://link.devnetwork.com/ycJYze4U
Join me!
I'd like to learn more about how YOU are using GitHub Copilot 
What's your experience like?
Amazon ElastiCache now supports 1-click connectivity setup between EC2 and your cache (similar to what we did previously for RDS).
AWS Console update You can now sign in to 5 different AWS accounts simultaneously in a single browser! Seamlessly manage dev, test & prod environments and compare resource configs and status across multiple accounts for troubleshooting issues and other application related activities.
