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Velocity's Edge Podcast S1E7 - Peat Bakke on Operationalizing Decision Records
When Peat Bakke sits down for breakfast with engineering leaders, the conversation inevitably turns to the same frustrating pattern: talented people leave, and with them goes critical context about why systems work the way they do. Not just the technical details—those live in the code—but the reasoning behind architectural and technical choices, the problems those choices solved, and crucially, the alternatives that were deliberately rejected.
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Velocity's Edge Podcast S1E6 - Thomas Dullien & Chris Swan on Decision Records
Most engineering leaders think institutional knowledge loss is an inevitable cost of growth. They see departing employees take critical context with them—why certain processes exist, what problems they solve, how trade-offs were evaluated—and assume the solution involves better handoff documentation or knowledge transfer sessions. But as EPSD Advisory Board members Thomas Dullien and Chris Swan learned through building and scaling organizations, the biggest risk isn’t losing people; it’s losing the reasoning behind the decisions those people made.
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Moneyball for Engineers
The history of management of software development is littered with failed and discredited efforts to objectively assess individual performance. There is little consensus in the industry, organizations vary widely in how they do this, subjectivity and politics are rife, and few (if any) engineering leaders are content with the status quo.
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The VW Group Data Breach is a Business Problem, not an IT Failure.
In December 2024, the Chaos Computer Club revealed that VW Group’s software unit Cariad exposed 9.5TB of sensitive data affecting 800,000 VW, Seat, Audi, and Skoda owners. The breach included personal information and location histories that, despite Cariad’s claims otherwise, were easily tied by researchers to individual customers.
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