Ben Zanin

Not "Atlassian laid off 1,600 people, 10% of its workforce"

But rather: "Atlassian leadership, with 300,000+ paying customers & ~5.2 billion USD in revenue & 6+ billion USD in assets in 2025, failed to line up their financial projections with their own staffing projections, and acted to place the burden of this gap on their direct reports rather than leadership, executive compensation packages, assets, or shareholders"

Layoffs should be personally mortifying. Boards should change.

For shame.

Thank goodness it is finally spring in Toronto! #dlws

The Yoink / Yeet Dichotomy

Something poignant about seeing the logo line "CLEVER DEVICES" displayed every nine seconds on the overhead in the bus

As the widget busily boot-loops over and over again

Because it's broooooooken

("This device is clever, and part of a clever system. We considered ourselves a clever species. The cleverness exists in your time, as it did in ours.")

May the patron saint of crosswalks and hydraulic bollards preserve me from old, entitled, oblivious men awkwardly piloting high powered sports cars that far outstrip their ability to control them safely; and preserve me also from all the other power they hold but cannot safely control, and for which they refuse to take responsibility.

(Sick and tired of luxury car drivers almost crushing me & other pedestrians by trying to push through a line of people crossing at a light. NO RIGHTS ON REDS.)

I get the strong impression that early, learning developers are better served by the tools offered with fantasy game consoles than by professional dev tools these days.

That impression underscores my belief that good dev tools should optimize for joy, experimentation, discovery, learning, and play *first*, and raw throughput second, if it all.

1/2

Katie and I just got home from Eddie¹ Izzard's one-woman performance of Hamlet. It was fantastic: delightful, hilarious, chilling. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were _perfect_.

https://www.mirvish.com/shows/hamlet

https://www.eddieizzardhamlet.com

Go see it if you get the chance.

¹: https://torontolife.com/culture/eddie-izzard-hamlet

Some friends and I have been exploring alternatives to Discord and Slack since both services are heading in intolerable directions.

We've looked at obvious choices like Matrix and Zulip, less obvious ones like Signal and Delta Chat, and some weird ones like the chat system built into the Fossil version control system.

I hoped Delta Chat would add channels, but no luck. I kind of expected we'd end up defaulting to Matrix.

But IRCv3 (Ergo / Goguma / Irctoday) is in the lead. Surprising.