ChatGPT offers a glimpse of the future, where a program can hold up its side of a conversation with competence. Before thinking about how we might feel about this, let’s look at an example:

Mike: What was the cause of the global financial crisis in 2008?

ChatGPT: The global financial crisis in 2008 was caused by a combination of factors, including the buildup of excessive levels of debt, risky financial practices by banks and other financial institutions, and a lack of adequate regulation. The crisis was triggered by a sharp increase in subprime mortgage defaults in the United States, which led to the collapse of several major financial institutions and the onset of a severe global recession.

Mike: What major financial institutions collapsed?

ChatGPT: During the global financial crisis in 2008, several major financial institutions collapsed, including Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch. These failures, along with the problems faced by other large financial institutions, contributed to the severity of the crisis and the onset of the global recession that followed.

What can we see from this snippet?

I recently spent too much time learning about the technologies that undergird my home network.

It came about because we recently built a study in the back garden for me to use when I’m working from home. One question that remained open throughout the build was what the network setup would be. I had four critical devices: my laptop, my phone and a pair of Sonos speakers.

The basic connection to the outdoor study is an ethernet cable running from the house. Due to the location of my router, however, that cable is hooked into my home network via the LAN port on a Google Wifi mesh access point. I wanted to have a further wifi access point in the study, connected to the ethernet cable, for my laptop, phone and speakers. I didn’t really have much confidence, however, in using a two wifi network hop between my router (and, hence, ISP) and my laptop. It just felt weird. Too many network gizmos to work.

Buuuuut, I really, really, really wanted it to work. What better excuse to deep dive on layer two networks to figure out how wild this network really is?! So I put on my sleuthing hat and decided to figure out whether this unholy pile of network was going to work, from the network frames upwards 🕵️

What follows is the picture I put together for myself. While I’ve tried to make it accurate, there’s a bunch of (somewhat educated!) guesswork going on where I tried to apply theory to my actual devices and network.

Much of Go’s standard library is basic at first sight, but can take you a long way. http is like that. flag is also like that. I think the flag package is unfairly maligned as underpowered.

Initially, it does seem that you are limited to simple constructions: the binary, then some named flags:

> greet --name Mike
Hi Mike!

But flag supports so much more than this. Let’s dig in to what you can do.

On and off for the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a theme for VS Code. It’s a light version of my favourite dark theme, Monokai Pro. Sadly I can’t share it as it amalgamates two different VS Code themes, one person’s theme suggestions in a GitHub comment and my own tweaks. I’ve no idea how that works for licensing, so I’m playing it safe.

Instead, I’ll share how I got there, because sometimes it’s good to read about a journey. If it inspires you, all the better.

I often believe that I need to write something completely new. But as I read more and more leadership articles, I realise that a lot of them cover the same ground. Even so, I find value in reading multiple takes and adaptations on the same idea. So I can write my own thoughts and contribute to this variety of interpretations. And, anyway, there is value for myself in writing down my versions of things, so I might as well. Here’s one of those things.

This is an idea I came across several years ago. It helped me to understand why creating alignment between individuals and teams is so important to the success of an organisation. It’s the notion that one can use vectors to model how individuals in an organisation contribute to the whole, and why aligned teams are so powerful.