Tom McLaughlin

People, hit me up with your tech / engineering feeds. #Cloud, #AWS, #DevOps… you know what I mean?

Been on Reddit talking about how I grew up in the US with a pro-IRA presence around me, as an adult realized they were bad, and after working with Northern Irish folks I came to loath Americans support of the IRA from safety and security.

And people are arguing with me using Star Wars analogies.

YouTube video by Saturday Night Live Romano Tours - SNL

My response when your team tells me they will be successful once they change LLM models. youtu.be/TbwlC2B-BIg?...

Now just short morning bike to a spot to have my coffee for an hour while just relaxing. Typically down in seaport along the harbor. Moved longer rides to the evening. So far so good. 🤞

Will be very happy if I can keep this routine up. 2/

Long COVID update:

With move I changed up my daily routines. Started (semi-)daily morning bike rides. No muscle or joint aches after exercise for a bit. But kept crashing mid to late in the afternoon through to next day. So still booming and busting. 1/

One of my greatest enjoys of this new place is morning roof deck breakfast as I watch Cinnamon explore and just enjoy herself.

My roof deck is shared with my neighbor. I let Cinnamon out to explore it when I’m up here.

Neighbors have a cat too. He’s watching out their door.

Cinnamon has decided today she will be laying around on the neighbor’s side. I think she’s pulling a power move.

If you’re going to rage against the machine…

It would first be helpful to understand how the machine works.

The MA Democratic Socialists had 1 person in the MA legislature and the party kicked him out for making compromised to get bills passed.

And before you say it, no, a single candidate winning a primary don’t mean shit. Still have to win a general, still have to govern, still need party support to not fall apart.

Imagine someone opening up a sports bar in Boston calling it “Yankee Bar”.

Will never matter how good it actually is as a bar, people are regularly just going to boo and yell “Yankees suck!” as they walk by.

And after it fails everyone would just ask, “We’re the owners that stupid or something?”

Most people don’t have firm ideologies and just react based on tribalism. That is to say, most people’s political ideologies are about as well thought out as their sports team affiliation.

Maybe focus on actually winning elections and governing before trying to rehabilitate a word that comes with strong negative connotations in this country.

But instead a bunch of ideological dweebs are more interested in somehow proving the superiority of socialism over capitalism and willingly drag along that boat anchor instead of focusing on actually winning.

What I find funny I find funny about Democratic Socialists is if they dropped the word socialism and said capitalism was awsome, and changed little to nothing else, they’d probably become wildly popular across this country.

The only times I’ve ever heard people say that are in the small number of anecdotes I’ve heard describing not just successful organizational change but organizational turn around.

So if anybody ever asks, you really can fire and lay off your way to improvement!

OK, maybe a little bit more accurately, firing and layoffs are a regrettable but necessary part of successful organizational change. As is top down mandates too.

So the GM Fremont plant wasn’t actually transformed. It was replaced by an entirely new entity a few years later.

This wasn’t organizational change… It was organizational replacement!

Instead Toyota came in with a top down mandate of how things would be run in the new plant.

Former plant workers were effectively given the option to opt in or not to those changes. And 15% for whatever reason did not opt in.

And NUMMI went on to become a high performing plant.

So GM Fremont closed, and workers were laid off, almost 3 years before NUMMI opened.

The Toyota Way didn’t change the Fremont plant culture because the plant had already been closed for a few years.

Just learning the NUMMI plant’s initial workforce was 85% formerly laid off workers from when the prior GM Fremont plant closed.

Did people have to reapply for their old jobs?

A question I’d like answered is what percentage of the NUMMI plant was GM versus Toyota employees? What about plant leadership?

My theory is many orgs don’t invest in having enough “change agents”. The result is those “change agents” just get overwhelmed by those preserving the existing system

Thinking about organizational change as I retro on some things.

Right now I’m interested in why some orgs succeed and others fail while supposedly doing the same things. I have some theories and one revolves around critical mass.

Sitting on my roof deck drinking my coffee with my cat pawing down by my feet is pretty nice.

Use mypy to start.

But your IDE should catch the argument mismatch.

Maybe we shouldn’t be listening to the sort of people whose strategy for supporting Palestinians resulted in helping elect the guy who wants to turn Gaza into a resort. 🤷‍♂️

I’m pricing American flags on Amazon because I keep getting closer to purchasing a stockpile to hand out at protests.

Because optic actually matter.

Made my usual reference to Plato’s Allegory Of The Cave in an engineering conversation and someone finally got it immediately.

Playing Civ 6 and while my civilization is staying out of trouble, I have a large amount of powder.

So I’m supplying both sides in some different conflicts going on elsewhere on the map.

Am I using Lambda destinations wrong by wanting to return a list of data and have each member of that list sent to the destination as a separate message? Why is that not a thing? #aws #lambda #serverless