Greater good, value gap, Viking, and a solar powered website
03 Sep 2024Greater good vs. individual autonomy
This article discusses the tradeoffs between global optimization and individual optimization as it applies it a workplace. It’s particularly interesting to me since I work on a small team in a large bureaucracy. In my experience, being on a small team leads to a relatively individualistic sense of “I’ll just do what is best for me”, and attempts to standardize efforts can feel like overkill. It’s an interesting discussion every time when deciding on whether reducing individual autonomy is worthwhile for the greater good of the team.
Article: https://longform.asmartbear.com/tension-autonomy-admin/
Differing values within a team causes tension
Interesting, this talks about situations where members of a software development team (probably any team) have differing values. Differing values doesn’t mean different skills, or that person A doesn’t value person B’s main value, it means that they just have different main values. While on the surface everyone might agrees that valueA and valueB are both important, in practice each person is spending energy and effort on different things. Depending on the severity of the “value gap”, this can cause team tension and dysfunction. On large teams this is mitigated by sheer numbers. On small teams it’s important to recognize these differences and work on value alignment.
Article: https://rtpg.co/2024/08/31/cost-of-a-values-gap
Viking
Viking handles software deployment to multiple machines. It lets you save a configuration for multiple machines (including ssh keys), they copy files between the local machine and the viking managed machines in parallel, or execute commands on those machines in parallel. The readme has a good “usage” section.
Repo: https://github.com/d3witt/viking
Solar powered website
Pretty self explanatory - this website is solar powered! It’s pretty cool. They talk about hardware and software optimizations they’ve made (it’s self hosted), as well as how much downtime they have from the batteries not getting charged well enough. I’m particularly interested in some of the software tweaks they made to really minimize energy consumption.
Website: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/