I'd heard of the "monkey" metaphor from my friend before, but I never really used it in my day-to-day work. When a report came my way with a technical problem they couldn't solve, my first reaction was always, "Okay, I'll take a look," instead of guiding them to take ownership and figure it out on their own.

Looking back, I wish I hadn't let those monkeys jump back onto my back so often. It ended up causing a growing backlog and a lot of pressure for me. It also made it hard for team growth.

This piece really speaks to me, and I'm curious how others here have experienced this in work.

I'm a people pleaser and am involved in too many things at work. Friday afternoon mid-sentence I realised I was putting like 5 monkeys on my back for something I'd get done before we start the sprint Monday morning...

Good article to reflect on. Tone is a bit crass maybe but a good read. Need to get better at helping (if I can) and then delegating, instead of defaulting to "let me look into it".

Looks cool! My current one is an Alientek T80 soldering iron, it goes up to 100W, but does not have a heat-resistant cap. This FixHub kit by iFixit looks much more sophisticated, would like to try it sometime.

I was surprised to see that it only costs around $14 in China, so I instantly ordered one. It would nicely fill the gap in VHF bands that are not supported by my Tecsun PL-365.

Cloned a 125KHz RFID keycard on my Flipper as a backup, my Android phone is able to clone 13.56MHz MIFAREs, but not these 125KHz ones.

The blog is cool. I know a little Japanese. I really appreciate that all the technical terms are written in plain English instead of Japanese Katakana words.

Thank you for the free zine! I found out that a discount is also available in my region, bought the 12-pack.

Guess that they will have to use voice input in the next few years. But what if some brain-machine interface like Neuralink actually gets to general availability?

One downside of voice interfaces is they are bad for privacy. How do you enter your password, credit card details, or social security number?

Voice is also much more distracting than tapping thumbs, as anyone who works in an open floor plan office can attest.

Exactly, the human body actually became the limitation. And all these remind me of Ace Combat 7 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Combat_7:_Skies_Unknown)

The first blog post of his that I read was Lights and Shadows (https://ciechanow.ski/lights-and-shadows/), and wow his blog is impressive. I love it!

The title reminds me of "How many engineers does it take to change a light bulb?"

What's your answer?

one engineer can do it in about four hours. three and a half hours to research the ideal replacement bulb, twenty five minutes to set up the ladder safely, and five minutes to replace the bulb itself. source: I'm an engineer and I replaced a lightbulb this week.

the real problem arises when you have multiple engineers replacing a lightbulb. the time needed to decide on a replacement bulb and agree that the ladder setup is safe is quadratic in n, where n is the number of engineers. it still only takes five minutes to replace it though :)

Many