Søren Vind

People + tech. Leads the Forecasting team in Maersk. Also @[email protected]

[Louie Bacaj @LBacaj]

From personal experience, I’ve found you get a lot further with people by treating them like adults. Many employers & managers don’t seem to do it.

Some people will let you down. But some will also go above & beyond, that won’t happen when you don’t trust them.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

Quality without a name

As companies grow, they often have a hard time with quality, and usually just give up on it. Main reason is that quality is something which cannot be easily measured or defined. As the companies scale, the way they operate or make decisions, are based more on measurements. They start flying with the dashboard instead of flying by looking out of the window because the former is easier to do in scale.

Christoper Alexander opens his book Timeless Way of Building, that in order to build with a timeless way, we first need to find the “quality without a name”.

What he is saying is that quality exists, it can be experienced and perceived, but it cannot be described by words. A town, place, or building that just feels good and natural.

You can spec that a door needs hinges and locks that function, but we all have experienced a wide range of very smoothly working, quality doors, and very janky working, bad quality doors.

Usually the quality doors happen because someone took the care to first build the door and all of its parts, and then install the frame and the door correctly, and kept it maintained over the years. Measurement like number of doors installed or times the door is used never gives you anything about how good it is.

This throws off many people in the tech world, where often things are seen as binary and belief that the world or anything can be reduced to mathematical formulas. It’s almost as if you have to stop thinking for a minute, and just focus on the experience.

The only way I know to promote quality in companies is to keep reminding people about the quality and why it matters. Most of us are in the retention business. We like to see our customers stick around, build trust and loyalty. Quality of the product, and customer is one the key drivers of that - yet many companies forget that.

So how to promote it? You can give examples of previous quality things the team has built, show other products or show your way of looking at things. When something feels quality, it often feels natural and you may even feel positively surprised. Quality is so rare generally that people are often surprised by it.

Quality rarely happens as an accident, it usually means someone is willing to go further building something that necessarily. At least, someone has to be motivated and allowed to do it, not forced to solely focus on some measurements.

Quality, brand and culture are some of those intangible things you need to create as a company founder.

[Cory House @housecor]

Want to do Continuous integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)? Then avoid creating a bunch of non-prod environments.

Here's why: Non-prod environments like QA, UAT, and Staging encourage “batching” work. This fights against CI and CD.

Example: If you only have a dev and a production environment, you're forced to do CI and CD. Why? Because you can’t batch up work with just 2 environments.

That’s a *good* thing. The constraint of few environments encourages desirable behaviors. 👍

“We shape our tools and then the tools shape us." - Winston Churchill

[Søren Vind @sorenvind]

@steveworkman @swyx What's the ratio of frontend vs non-frontend tech people? How many principal ICs?

I believe one of the factors affecting the balance is that we've historically built independent apps for specific problems rather than flexible systems that require more depth. This must change.

[Søren Vind @sorenvind]

@ThomasLindegard I'm curious, is she fully crewed while docking? I guess you carry out regular maintenance inside?

[Søren Vind @sorenvind]

@cpnielsen Drikker direkte af kartonen 👍

[Søren Vind @sorenvind]

@rahulj51 💯 exactly why cross functional teams work well. Having people with different perspective work closely together brings better outcomes

[Ben See @ClimateBen]

BREAKING: scientists urge immediate systemic change away from fossil-driven economic growth which could destroy everything as they confirm climate risks and impacts have been systematically underestimated and might be approaching almost apocalyptic levels within 15 or 20 years 🧵

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Talking with @mkanat about dev productivity:

"The universe of ML engineers is completely different from being any type of dev. The kind of pain you're going through is unbelievable. You could run a Python script for eight hours, just to discover there's a typo in your code."

[Søren Vind @sorenvind]

@GergelyOrosz @mkanat This exactly is the reason we've built our entire stack around fast iterations for at-scale experiments and automated testing and operations. Otherwise meaningful progress is basically impossible.

[Zach Wilson @Zachly]

Starting out in the data field can be overwhelming. Should you be a data scientist? A data engineer? A data analyst? An ML engineer? The number of role options is overwhelming!

Here's some high-level guidance on how to pick between some of these roles.
1/5

[Rahul Jain @rahulj51]

@teej_m Not explicitly. But data engineering is seen as non-fungible from swe in most of Europe. And there is a misunderstanding that data engineering is not software engineering.

[Søren Vind @sorenvind]

@KatrineVillar Måske. Det var nødvendigt og godt med den strategi jeg skrev før for os for at undgå kedhed og skænderier på grund af bagateller. Vi er også meget til mere aktive ferier, og jeg regner ikke med at vi ender der mere

[Søren Vind @sorenvind]

@KatrineVillar Det var glimrende, men samme problemer som alle andre chartersteder vi har besøgt hvis man har svært ved at sidde stille længe

[Søren Vind @sorenvind]

@KatrineVillar Vi har prøvet det et par gange og var egentlig nået frem til at vi ikke behøvede det mere. Men så var vi på Playitas i foråret og fik det til at være godt for os: Motion og alenetid til begge voksne hver dag. Forsigtig med buffeten. Noget på programmet udover pool (også ungerne)

[Erik Bernhardsson @bernhardsson]

Many brave engineers have tried but none have succeeded… building the perfect abstraction on top of Kubernetes and Docker for data scientists… “this abstraction shall never expose the underlying layers”, these brave teams proclaimed

[Lautaro Vergara 🇺🇦 @VergaraLautaro]

PhD student attending first big conference, with advisor.

[Søren Vind @sorenvind]

@mikaelvalsted Efter sådan en tur er udhvilet når du to dage i træk går i seng 20:30 og vågner 6 uden natteroderi. Krydser fingre for dig i nat!

[Maersk @Maersk]

Stepping up our green transformation with 6 additional large container vessels🚢💚 We now have 19 container vessels able to operate on green methanol on order, all to be delivered by 2025. The new vessels will be built by @Hyundai_Global
Read more: https://t.co/r6EBpU9gdx #maersk

[Nate Sooter ⛳️ @NateSooter]

Working on some slides this AM. I've seen specific 'hierarchy of needs' pyramids, but nothing that's more generic for a business facing audience. Curious to hear Data Twitter's thoughts.