Agile software development is about working in small batch sizes, and taking engineering seriously. If anyone tells you otherwise they are probably selling you something.

I wish I knew where this come from, so far search hasn't turned anything up. Any ideas?

The Verge has a great piece on the world of Amazon sellers, and the crazy Gilliam-esque world they operate in.

For sellers, Amazon is a quasi-state. They rely on its infrastructure — its warehouses, shipping network, financial systems, and portal to millions of customers — and pay taxes in the form of fees. They also live in terror of its rules, which often change and are harshly enforced. A cryptic email like the one Plansky received can send a seller’s business into bankruptcy, with few avenues for appeal.

And as the system gets more byantine, other business opportunities arise:

And what’s a seller to do when they end up in Amazon court? They can turn to someone like Cynthia Stine, who is part of a growing industry of consultants who help sellers navigate the ruthless world of Marketplace and the byzantine rules by which Amazon governs it. They are like lawyers, only their legal code is the Amazon Terms of Service, their court is a secretive and semiautomated corporate bureaucracy, and their jurisdiction is an algorithmically policed global bazaar rife with devious plots to hijack listings for novelty socks and plastic watches. People like Stine are fixers, guides to the cutthroat land of Amazon, who are willing to give their assistance to the desperate — for a price, of course.

The world today is a weird place.

Difference between engineering and management: If you deploy bad code, you break production. If you deploy bad decisions, you break people.

— Katie Womersley (@katie_womers) 27 July 2017

Obviously, open by default is the new fashionable, but I'm pretty sure it's no longer enough for organisations to be "open" because no matter how hard you try, eventually that just becomes PR and marketing fluff. Much better to aim to be porous. For people and conversations and ideas to flow in and out irrespective of departmental and organisational boundaries. Rip down the barriers to conversation and collaboration internally and externally.

Michael Smethurst

So here is my rule of thumb. If someone comes to me with an idea, even if my immediate reaction is very negative, ask at least three questions about that idea to make sure you really understand it and appreciate it.

Leisa Reichelt

If the process insists that humans act more like machines/robots/spreadsheets than real human beings, challenge that process.

Leisa Reichelt

Too many people think graphic design is not a specialty, but something anyone can do, because the tools to make decent-looking Web pages, newsletters, books, and the like are readily available. But design isn't putting stuff on a page. It's about solving visual problems through an iterative process of decisionmaking, which may involve consultation, or may happen in private. If you can't master that process, you can't work in the field.

Glenn Fleishman on Yahoo's logo redesign.

8. When a company or industry is facing changes to its business due to technology, it will argue against the need for change based on the moral importance of its work, rather than trying to understand the social underpinnings.

10 Rules of Internet - Anil Dash.

Done is better than perfect, or "the best" is the enemy of "the good". Perfectionism is a form of procrastination. It assumes that time is an infinite resource, that other tasks can wait while you add "just one more touch" and that "perfect" is attainable.

One of the guiding principles behind Shopify’s apps team. Great advice for any dev team.

Take time to think about your own professional communications. Don’t accept biz-speak as the right solution, regardless of how ubiquitous it is. Be human, and engage directly with people - they’ll respect you for it, and be more willing to give your business a chance.

Matt Gemmell rewrites Adobe's press release announcing the end of Flash for mobile. It's like Adobe never read the Cluetrain Manifesto.