Wolfgang Kaufmann

I help teams and organizations to build things that last.

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. [..] I know we can teach our children nothing. Each must learn its lessons anew." --Albert Einstein, 1929

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"An LLM can be instructed to just figure all that shit out. Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development means tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better." --@tqbf

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"The compounding nature of failures increases the importance of maintenance for every critical component." --Daniel Puttick

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"Adding features wins games, but bug fixing wins championships." --@hypercritical

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"The path is clear: we are no longer just using machines, we are now working with them. We'll look back at this decade the way past generations looked at electricity or the printing press — not as a curiosity, but as the moment when everything changed." --@mitsuhiko

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"Most of your thoughts are not actually yours: they arose and grew and evolved in many other brains before they infected you." -- @aureliengeron (or GitHub's Copilot) in "Natural Language Processing with Transformers"

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"Interesting and significant software is beyond the capacity of any one person to build alone in a reasonable time frame. This means that the fundamental, crucial, core skills in building software are communication and collaboration." --@LarsWirzenius

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"Data is the most critical part of your infrastructure. You lose your network: that’s downtime. You lose your data: that’s a company ending event." --@JackLindamood

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is." -- Benjamin Brewster, Yale Literary Magazine, 1882

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"Planning is not a substitute for testing." --@CaryMillsap #HowtoMakeThingsFaster

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"Testing? TESTING?

Why do you think I do open source? I like the programming part. I even like the debugging part. But testing - that's what users are for. No?" -- Linus Torvalds

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"But since I can't really test them myself, I'd really like that. I did these patches just by looking at the source code, and while I think that's an excellent way to do development, I do think that testing is _also_ required." -- Linus Torvalds

[Gregor @ghohpe]

Microservices architecture

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

It will never again be as easy to debug a problem as it was right after it was written and shipped. It only gets harder from there; speed is key.” (2/2) #ObservabilityEngineering

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

“Quickly resolving bugs critically depends on being able to examine the problem while the original intent is still fresh in the original author’s head. (1/2)

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” — Carl Edward Sagan

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"In a sense, all understanding is compression." --@ryanatmention #LightbendDataEngineering

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

"It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself." --Charles Robert Darwin

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

To increase producivity @nejatian, COO @Shopify, announced that they will start into 2023 with an experiment: Cancel all recurring meetings with more than 3 people and motivate employees to "only return to truly essential meetings" after a two weeks cooling off period.

[Kaz Nejatian @nejatian]

Meetings are a bug. Today, we shipped a fix to this bug at @Shopify.

To start 2023, we're cancelling all Shopify meetings with more than two people. Let's give people back their maker time. Companies are for builders. Not managers.

https://t.co/aw7BJxwmC6

[Wolfgang Kaufmann @datentyp]

“And too many people from the business see software developers and engineers as nothing more than programmers who should just make the system do what the business says it should.” [2/2] —@davidand393 #TheValueFlywheelEffect