Archive

Summarization is Sugar

The robot fever seems to be passing as I wrote a piece that at first glance has nothing to do with robots… except it sort'f does. As I was letting the final piece stew, I dropped a venty footnote that talks about a certain demographic that worries me

Dance. Robots.

Saying I've been getting the robots to dance for me is an understatement. My second display is dominated by terminal windows with the robots busily doing stuff. What stuff? The most reliable use cases are: research buddy and tool builder. I've recently started paying more attention

No One Reads Email Anymore

Which isn't true. In fact, email is doing quite well. The robots tell me that there are 4.6 billion users in 2025 and that there will be 4.8 billion in 2027. Your average email user receives 80 emails per day, with 50% of those being spam.

Rands Cheat Sheet #1

The Rands in Repose weblog has been around for 23 years, and I’ve published hundreds of articles over those years. One of the more consistent pieces of layout feedback is “Why do you bury the publishing date at the bottom of the post?” My response is the same: “Why

Three Ideas for Sunday

When it comes to communication with humans who care about Rands, I have many mediums at my disposal. Twitter used to be the dominate medium, but then that guy screwed it up. BlueSky is the most likely replacement, although I like Mastodon’s vibes. There’s also the Rands Leadership

The Product Engineer

Who builds the product?

Musings on the New Year

I hope you are well. As I am apt to do, I am surprised by the consistent growth of this newsletter. Folks keep clicking join, and I continue failing to share compelling content. Let’s fix that. There are scads of new Important Thing podcasts. Traffic and reach are tricky

Poets and Police.

Wow, they finish things.

Words on Founder Mode

The debate is more interesting than the idea

Seven Conversation Hacks

Full-body listening

The Second Robot Report

The LLM Conversation

The Moments That Shaped You

No one cared if I did nothing.

"Is Engineering Working Hard Enough?"

When I ask questions, do they have good answers?

Staying Technical (Still)

Stubbornly curious

Staying Technical

Over at the Rands Leadership Slack, there’s a #ask-rands-anything channel and sometimes I just crush it in terms of answers. A member asked me about why I remain technical as a senior leader: The mistake I made was thinking part of the job of growing as a manager/leader

Leadership Mantras in Progress

More reason to move briskly.

An Unreasonable New Year Investment

Happy New Year, Substack friends. It rained hard here last night. My New Year’s pieces tend to perform better than the rest of the year's work, probably because we have a fresh start perspective. Whatever I have to write tends to hit harder. I’ve been tinkering

The Business or the Contagion?

Hi Substack. Hope you are staying cool. I’ve posted a couple of significant pieces in the last week. The Contagion riffs on communication ideas I started to write about in How to Build a Rurmor. We, as a species, have wasted so much of our lives with crap information…

Terrified of Magic

I’m currently in one of those strange situations where I am writing a ton, and the timing is curious. I am furiously working on finishing the second edition of the second book and writing a talk for a conference in Switzerland where I’ve chosen (with zero pressure) to

Here Come the Robots

Thanks, universe!