Or "DEFM":  Designing (Engineers) for Manufacturing".

The Economist's Boss Class podcast recently interviewed Robin Dunbar of "Dunbar's number" fame, which reminded me about some other reading I'd done about spans of control. How large can a team get before it becomes ineffective? Surprisingly small!

Last month (May 2025) I was excited to learn from Hyundai that they planned to ship me a free adapter that would enable my 2023 electric car to use Tesla-style chargers. But I when got to try out the adapter for the first time last week it didn't work. Nothing was wrong with the car, adapter, or charging station - but the situation is more complicated than I thought.

I've had direct reports temporarily assigned to me a few times.  Normally that meant that I didn't manage their "HR" tasks (e.g. time cards), but for whatever reason I needed to step in to help a team achieve a turnaround that was durable enough that the people could be "handed back" to their regular manager after only a few weeks or months and the benefits would continue. I understand management expectations, set team expectations, and manage the team while improving their processes and tools.

I believe that the Netflix show Cobra Kai would not have existed without the movie Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle , via the show How I Met Your Mother . This post is the cinema / TV equivalent of "No F-15 without XB-70" .

I just finished Scott Kelly's book Endurance about his year (-ish) in space on the International Space Station.  Before Kelly was an astronaut, he w as a US Navy naval aviator flying the F-14 Tomcat.  He surprised me by ragging on the F-14.  What's his criticism ?

It's surprisingly easy

Or "Defiant to the End"

Or Some Principles I’ve Learned the Hard Way I’ve built powerful software tools for multiple purposes and companies. What makes "the best" different is that they didn’t start out powerful. Every one of those tools started with a simple implementation that allowed me to learn more about the customer and keep adding features until it was “done” enough that the user ran out of significant updates to request. They haven’t been formal Agile or Scrum developments, but I’ve borrowed from those tool-sets. Today I’m musing on how I’ve planned for iteration at different levels of the tools and how that’s felt throughout the process. The tools are mostly Excel / Google Sheets, SAP, and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) / Google Apps Script (GAS). I’ve discussed many of these tools before: Overlap tool Follow-up through Outlook, OneNote, and To Do RFQ / CBF SAP tool Change Board Shortage report Small business Square/Google Sheets integration Purchase requisition tracking Spreadshee...