2023 In Review

2023 was an incredible year in our industry, so I thought I’d look back and share the things I’ve loved reading, watching, learning and doing this year.

Blogs

• The Github one on Copilot, a slow and high level reveal around how Copilot is put together. Also, Jaccard similarity ftw!
• LLM Patterns, Eugene Yan’s summary post back in the Summer described a bunch of reference architectures for an emerging field for the first time.
• How To Do Great Work, Paul Graham. The one you wish you’d read at 17.

Podcasts

• Chris Lattner on Mojo/Modular (Lex), not just for the technical depth, but for Chris role modelling the behavior of a world class engineer.
• Robert Playter (Boston Dynamics) (Lex), for the mission and the journey and the care that has been put into capturing the beauty of human movement.
• Eric Reis (Lenny), Eric does a tear down of the key concepts from Lean Startup that challenged what I thought I knew about the book.
• JTBD w/ Bob Moesta (Lenny), bitchin’ ain’t switchin'.

Paper

• The Dawn of LMMs. Eye opening. The “oh right” moment that lit up the adjacent possible for me.

Book

• Dynamic Reteaming, Heidi’s masterpiece improved my craft as a leader. Grow and split, story of our team and fist of five are my faves.

Vid

• State of GPT Andrej Karpathy’s talk at Microsoft Build, a 45 minute tour de force in May. The Intro to LLMs one is good too. Maybe a bit higher level.

Framework

• Playwright seems to have all the buzz and be one of those where as soon as folks start using it they love it and can’t see a way back, I’m probably late to the party though. Great write up here for those coming from Cypress.

Leak

• The Google one on AI, in the long run clearly right, but in the long run we’re all dead anyway. Honourable mention to the Mistral AI strategic memo.

Product Feature

• Honest mobile, the typeform that slides out if you passively browse the site but don’t convert for 5 minutes.
• Hofy store and reuse and asset tracking releases, game changers in our product. We now have 95% global coverage for storage, 96% coming soon. 2024 will be huge.

Product Technique

• Friction logging of third parties, picked up from Slack. Friction log other people’s products, a different approach to building competitor awareness. Also neatly works as a product coaching technique without the emotional attachment of it being your own baby.

Architectural Technique

• Pyramid of consistency. Its a small but a useful one. A complement to a tech radar, an exercise that you can do to map out as a team how strong/weak your sentiment is around adopted technolgies and practices, which opens things up for debate a bit more. Hat tip to Doccla, as I picked this up from them.