I’ve been a huge fan of the annual DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) report since reading the Accelerate book that explains the DORA metrics and how to improve them. The 2025 DORA report (pdf attached here) just came out and has a particularly interesting section on AI Capabilities. I summarize some of the points here […]| Shaun Abram
Every time I work with someone on my team about sharing a newsletter or a blog post, we talk about headlines, and I always think of this quote from “The Shipping News”: Billy: “You have to start by making up some headlines. You know: short, punchy, dramatic headlines. … Tell me the headline.”Quoyle: “Horizon Fills […]| Shaun Abram
Birgitta Böckeler, a Distinguished Engineer at Thoughtworks, recently posted a list of links that “describe what my colleagues and I are learning and thinking” around generative AI and LLMs. One in particular that I liked was “The role of developer skills in agentic coding” (written by Böckeler herself). Böckeler states that agentic coding assistants are […]| Shaun Abram
I like this GenAI: Perception vs Reality pdf from Jellyfish. Short and sweet. Jellyfish provides visibility into software development processes by integrating with Jira, GitHub, and CI/CD pipelines. As a result of their large customer base, Jellyfish are able to analyze more data than most individual companies can. In this case, they looked at 4,200 […]| Shaun Abram
I remain a big fan of the Thoughtworks TechRadar, and v32 (pdf) was just released. Below are some of the things that stood out for me. Mostly copy/pasted/reworded with a few comments. Themes Supervised agents in coding assistants More and more tool accelerate the capabilities of coding assistants by allowing developers to drive implementation directly […]| Shaun Abram
CEO of Shopify, Tobi Lutke, posted an “internal” memo entitled “Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify“. It very publicly leaked and he has since shared it himself on twitter. It is generating a lot of discussion (e.g. CNBC, Forbes, Techcrunch). First, let’s start with the term “Reflexive AI”. I was initially […]| Shaun Abram
The 10x Developer vs. AI: Will Tech’s Elite Coder Be Replaced? (thenewstack.io) is an article about embracing AI to create high-performing dev teams. The article starts by talking about the risks of “the mythical 10x developer”, where there is a focus on output (such as lines of code) rather than outcome, arguing that productivity is […]| Shaun Abram
I read 7 books in the last half of the year (excluding “work” books and what I read with my daughter): The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle The 5AM Club, Robin Sharma A Perfect Spy, John le Carré Slow Horses, Mick Herron Quiet: The Power of Introverts, Susan Cain Leonardo Da Vinci, Walter Isaacson Moving […]| Shaun Abram
We were fortunate enough to have Eric Boles as our keynote speaker at a company event in June 2024, and I decided to follow up by reading his book Moving to Great. Boles is a motivational speaker & leadership coach and shares his path from a scrawny kid to a “collegiate All-American” athlete, being drafted […]| Shaun Abram
After reading The Mona Lisa Vanishes by Nicholas Day with my daughter, I expressed an interest in learning more about Leonardo Da Vinci. Sure enough, she gifted me the wonderful Leonardo Da Vinci, by Walter Isaacson as a Christmas gift, and I had finished the 600+ pages by New Year’s Eve. I loved it. Leonardo […]| Shaun Abram
Blog post summary: Periodic Face-to-Face by Martin Fowler| Shaun Abram
The 2022 Void Report came out in late 2022, It is a recommended read, and I previously summarized it here. This article focuses on one aspect of the report: why mean time to recover (MTTR) is not an appropriate metric for complex software systems.| Shaun Abram
2022 VOID Report Summary| Shaun Abram