Hey there! This post covers a variety of engaging topics. I explore how to maximize spinning hard drive speeds and reflect on coping with the end of summer. There’s a cool piece on GitHub Models and even a look at what Olympians eat for breakfast! Plus, I dive into server closet cooling tips and the pitfalls of soft deletes. Dive in for more!

• Getting the Most Performance out of Spinning Hard Drives, Part 1: How to Guarantee the Best Speeds: Did you know that the first things you save to a spinning hard drive take advantage of faster read speeds? That means you can guarantee fast performance using these tips.
• A Foot in Two Worlds: Coping with the Last Weeks of Summer: It’s a good moment to humbly acknowledge our limits, manage expectations, and focus on our most important work
• Introducing GitHub Models: A new generation of AI engineers building on GitHub: We are enabling the rise of the AI engineer with GitHub Models – bringing the power of industry leading large and small language models to our more than 100 million users directly on GitHub.
• A New Cookbook Saved My New Kitchen Garden This Year: Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook inspires Ranter Marianne Willburn to get up and face another hot, dry day in the kitchen garden.
• Building the GTM Foundations: No matter the stage, sector, or size of a company, many struggle with their GTM strategy due to the same fundamental mistake: trying to do too much at the same time.
• The Art of Asking Smarter Questions: With organizations of all sorts facing increased urgency and unpredictability, being able to ask smart questions has become key. But unlike lawyers, doctors, and psychologists, business professionals are not formally trained on what kinds of questions to ask when approaching a problem. They must learn as they go. In their research and consulting, the authors have seen that certain kinds of questions have gained resonance across the business world. In a three-year project they asked executives to brainstorm about the decisions they’ve faced and the kinds of inquiry they’ve pursued. In this article they share what they’ve learned and offer a practical framework for the five types of questions to ask during strategic decision-making: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. By attending to each, leaders and teams can become more likely to cover all the areas that need to be explored, and they’ll surface information and options they might otherwise have missed.
• catppuccin: Soothing pastel theme for the high-spirited!
• Why soft deletes are evil and what to do instead: Whilst soft deletes provide a “safe” (read: easily reversible) way of deleting records, I have come to realise that they can create far more problems than they solve.
• How I Computer in 2024: An extended “uses” post that outlines the hardware I’m currently using, the software and tools that I use to get things done, and how I configure things.
• Licensing the World’s Collective Knowledge: This article serves as a warning to small and midsized publishers. The future of your companies is in jeopardy. AI is here and moving fast.
• What Do Olympians Eat for Breakfast?: Six Paris-bound athletes share how pancakes, Pop-Tarts and mid-game Skittles power their training.
• Jeff Bezos’ famed management rules are slowly unraveling inside Amazon. Can they survive the Andy Jassy era?: More than three years after Bezos passed the CEO baton to Jassy, and as Amazon marks its 30th birthday, there are signs that the company’s unique work culture is starting to fray.
• Why the CrowdStrike bug hit banks hard: Regulation-induced monocultures meet unfortunate but explicable engineering decisions.
• 2024-07-31 just disconnect the internet: So, let’s say that a security vendor, we’ll call them ClownStrike, accidentally takes down most of their Windows install base with a poorly tested content update. Rough day at the office, huh?
• Venting a Server Closet (The Right Way): Venting a server closet to keep your server, theater room gear, and router cool is essential in both home an business environments. Learn the right way!
• Cooling my Home Server Closet with the AC Infinity Airframe T7: I used the AC Infinity Airframe to bring down my server closet temperatures because the room was always sitting around 90°F or more. This installation is what worked for my specific situation which you may be able to adapt in your home. You could also do this for an Audio/Video Closet or Network Closet.