Vote for my Grace Hopper proposal
Before I get into this week’s content… I submitted a proposal to speak at the Grace Hopper Celebration!
Whether or not you’re attending this year’s GHC, if you’d like to upvote my proposal to help me get on the Grace Hopper agenda, you can do so here: Your Code Works. Now What? A Guide to Enterprise Production Readiness
Talks are listed alphabetically, and my title starts with the word “Your” …so I have no chance whatsoever unless my network shows up for me.
Stay tuned for my 2027 talk, entitled: “01 Absolutely Amazing Tip For Naming Your GHC Talk Proposal.”
Okay! Onward to this week’s content.
Questions I return to often
For the next few weeks, I’m planning to write about some of the questions that come to my mind often that I find useful to ask.
This week’s question: Who benefits?
When to raise it: When you start to wonder why something is happening.
Investigators ask this question (Cui bono, in Latin, because… law) to get clues about who might be responsible for criminal activity and help uncover hidden motives. This question is often phrased another way in English: “follow the money.”
I’m finding it connected to one of the questions in my book, the question I like to refer to as “what are we even doing here, people??” Because sometimes I wonder if, as software engineers and the managers of same, we haven’t thought enough about why we do what we do, and who benefits from the things we’re doing.
Baratunde Thurston takes this question on for the topic of AI adoption, specifically all the promises of increased productivity and pressure to adopt AI ever faster, in his video here: Where’s All That Free Time AI CEOs Promised?
I love the point he makes in that video about things seeming so… mandatory. Isn’t that interesting…
That’s all this week - keeping it short.
Drop me a note
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