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Organizing notes by topic sounds logical until you have notes on PostgreSQL in five different folders and cannot find the one that matters for today's problem. The issue is not discipline. The issue is that topic-based organization asks the wrong question. "What is this about?" is useful for libraries. For engineers, the better question is "What am I doing with this?" That is the premise of PARA. PARA is a simple four-bucket system created by Tiago Forte as the organizational backbone of his Building a Second Brain framework. The idea is that all information can be sorted into four categories: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. Each category represents a different level of actionability, and that distinction drives where every note lives. This guide applies PARA to engineering work specifically — codebases, documentation, learning material, and the tension between active project work and long-term reference. The Problem With Topic-Based Organization Most engineers organize knowledge the way they organize code: by domain. databases/ postgresql/ redis/ api/ rest/ graphql/ devops/ kubernetes/ terraform/ That structure makes sense when you are browsing. It breaks down when you need something for a specific task. You remember a useful note about database migration safety, but it could be in databases/postgresql/ , devops/deployments/ , api/versioning/ , or nowhere because you saved it somewhere temporary. Topic folders force you to decide where knowledge belongs before you understand its context. PARA delays that decision — instead of asking what something is about, it asks what you are currently doing with it. The Four Buckets Projects A project is active, time-bound work with a defined outcome. For engineers, projects are things like: Migrate billing service to queue v2 Upgrade PostgreSQL from 14 to 16 Write architecture decision record for auth service redesign Implement rate limiting on public API Publish article about distributed tracing Every project has a c

Il venture capital con progetti a 4-5 anni incarna perfettamente la tensione tra la teoria di Manso e la filosofia di Taleb. È un orizzonte temporale che suona contro-intuitivo: troppo lungo per la logica del "fail fast" da incubatore, troppo corto per la pazienza della ricerca fondamentale. Eppure è proprio qui che si gioca la partita dell'innovazione dirompente. Il problema strutturale I fondi VC operano tipicamente su cicli di 10 anni. Un progetto a 4-5 anni occupa il cuore del fondo: non è un esperimento rapido da liquidare, ma nemmeno un investimento da tenere per un'intera generazione. Manso ci dice che il contratto ottimale per l'innovazione richiede tolleranza nel breve termine e ricompensa nel lungo. Ma cosa significa "breve" e "lungo" quando il progetto stesso dura 4-5 anni? Qui emerge un paradosso. Il VC tollerante — quello che Manso celebrerebbe — potrebbe essere tentato di mantenere vivo un progetto che sta fallendo, perché il fallimento prematurato distruggerebbe il valore dell'opzione. Ma Taleb ci avverte: l'antifragilità non è la persistenza a oltranza, è la capacità di trarre beneficio dallo stress. Un progetto che assorbe risorse per 5 anni senza generare informazioni utili non è antifragile: è semplicemente costoso. La soluzione di Manso: il contratto come orologio Per Manso, la risposta sta nella struttura contrattuale. Il contratto ottimale per un progetto a 4-5 anni non è lineare: non è un flusso costante di finanziamento legato a milestone arbitrarie. È qualcosa di più sofisticato. Il principale (il VC) deve commettere a un livello di finanziamento iniziale che copra la fase esplorativa — i primi 12-18 mesi — senza richiedere risultati misurabili. Questa è la fase di "tolleranza eccezionale per il fallimento" di cui parlava Holmström. Poi, a intervalli predeterminati, il VC ha l'opzione — non l'obbligo — di continuare. Ma la soglia di abbandono deve essere più bassa del livello ottimale ex-post. In altre parole: il VC deve essere disposto a co

Gustavo Manso (Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley) e Nassim Taleb affrontano entrambi il problema centrale dell'innovazione, ma da angolazioni complementari: Manso con la precisione del contratto ottimale, Taleb con la filosofia dell'antifragilità . Entrambi convergono su un'idea contro-intuitiva: per generare innovazione dirompente, bisogna proteggere il fallimento. Manso: Il contratto come strumento di tolleranza Il lavoro di Manso si concentra sui meccanismi di incentivazione che rendono l'innovazione possibile all'interno delle organizzazioni. La sua ricerca fondamentale (2011) modella esplicitamente il trade-off tra exploration (esplorazione di azioni nuove e non testate) e exploitation (sfruttamento di azioni note). Manso dimostra che i contratti ottimali per motivare l'innovazione richiedono una combinazione specifica: tolleranza per i fallimenti nel breve termine e ricompensa per il successo nel lungo termine . Questo è l'esatto opposto del classico "pay-for-performance" (paga in base alle prestazioni), che funziona bene per compiti routine ma soffoca l'innovazione. Come ha osservato Bengt Holmström (1989), citato da Manso, le attività innovative "richiedono una tolleranza eccezionale per il fallimento" perché il processo è imprevedibile e idiosincratico. Uno studio empirico fondamentale — che applica direttamente la teoria di Manso al venture capital — ha mostrato che i VC più tolleranti verso il fallimento generano startup significativamente più innovative. Un aumento dell'1% nella tolleranza al fallimento del VC porta a un aumento dello 0,5% nelle citazioni per brevetto. L'effetto è amplificato nelle recessioni e per le startup in fase iniziale. Manso ha anche esteso questa logica al finanziamento della ricerca scientifica, mostrando come la struttura dei fondi influenzi gli studi dirompenti. La sua analisi suggerisce che le leggi del lavoro che proteggono i dipendenti dal licenziamento arbitrario — attraverso quello che gli studiosi chiamano "effetto a

AWS recently introduced Amazon Cognito multi-region replication, which automatically replicates user identities and user pool configurations from a primary region to a secondary one. This enables applications to continue authenticating users from a replica region during outages, without requiring custom replication and failover mechanisms. By Renato Losio

This week's releases split neatly into two categories: useful incremental hardening (uv, GitLab, Copilot) and things that should change how you architect systems today (Spring CVEs, pg_durable, and a Cornell paper that quietly invalidates a lot of RAG assumptions). The Spring security cluster alone is enough to justify a dependency audit before the weekend. uv 0.11.19 adds CPython 3.15 beta support uv now always computes SHA256 checksums for remote distributions—previously this was situational—and adds PyEmscripten platform support per PEP 783, which formalizes Python packaging for browser and WASM targets. CPython 3.15.0b2 is available as a managed runtime, and a cross-platform installation edge case on Windows hosts has been resolved. The SHA256 change is the one worth noting for security posture. Making verification unconditional rather than optional closes a gap where distribution integrity could go unchecked depending on resolver path. The PyEmscripten addition matters if you're packaging Python for browser runtimes—previously you were working around the absence of a formal platform tag; now you're not. Verdict: Ship. Drop-in upgrade, no breaking changes. If you manage Python distributions or target WASM, update now. Everyone else should still update—supply-chain hardening by default is worth the two minutes. GitLab 19.0 adds group-level review instructions, secrets manager GitLab 19.0 ships two meaningful additions for teams: group-level custom review instructions for Duo code review, configured via .gitlab/duo/mr-review-instructions.yaml with cascading inheritance across projects, and a Secrets Manager that exits closed beta for Premium and Ultimate tiers. Group-level review instructions solve a real annoyance—if you've been maintaining per-project AI review configuration across a monorepo organization, you can now centralize that and let projects inherit or override. It's the kind of change that sounds minor until you've had to sync a guideline update across

Doomscrolling on social media is a very common problem and can feel like an endless loop of constantly losing track of time. Instead of tackling this issue with strict limits, a new mindful screen time app called Mivo Scrolling is trying to shake things up. Launched last month, Mivo doesn’t look super different from other […]

Google Open Knowledge Format: Why Enterprise Agents Need a Knowledge Layer, Not Just More Tools Most enterprise AI conversations still start in the wrong place. They start with the model. Which model should we use? Which framework should we adopt? Which vendor has the best agent platform? Which tools should we connect next? These are fair questions. But in real enterprise architecture, they are not the hardest questions. The harder question is this: Can our AI systems actually understand how our business works? That is why Google Cloud’s article on Open Knowledge Format caught my attention. The article talks about a simple but important idea: representing knowledge in a way that humans can read and machines can use. In OKF, that means markdown for the content and structured metadata for context. At first glance, that may sound too simple. But that simplicity is the point. Enterprises do not need another place where knowledge goes to die. We already have enough portals, catalogs, wikis, dashboards, folders, and internal tools. What we need is a practical way to package knowledge so it can be reviewed, versioned, governed, searched, and reused by both people and AI agents. That is where this idea becomes very relevant for agentic AI. The Real Enterprise AI Problem Most organizations already have the knowledge their AI agents need. They have it in databases, dashboards, tickets, architecture notes, runbooks, Confluence pages, data catalogs, code comments, incident reports, old project documents, and the heads of experienced employees. The issue is not that knowledge does not exist. The issue is that it is fragmented. Some of it is outdated. Some of it is duplicated. Some of it is tribal. Some of it is locked inside tools. Some of it is written for humans but not structured enough for AI systems to use reliably. This becomes a serious problem when we move from AI assistants to AI agents. An assistant can give a helpful answer. An agent does more. It plans, selects tools

I have done this process wrong more times than I would like to admit. You call the references the vendor sends you. Three customers, all happy, all articulate, all saying roughly the same things. You hang up feeling good. You sign. Six months later you are dealing with a support team that responds every 72 hours and a renewal quote that is 40% higher than year one. The reference check told you nothing useful. Not because the customers lied. Because you asked the wrong questions. Here is what I ask now. "How many people at the vendor have you spoken to in the last six months?" One contact who handles everything and is sometimes slow — that tells you something. A team of people across sales, technical support, and leadership — that tells you something different. Enterprise AI vendors with thin account teams show their limitations at exactly the moment you need them most: when something breaks at the worst possible time. "Tell me about the last time something broke in production." Not IF something broke. Something always breaks. I want to know what happened next. Did the vendor show up? Did they communicate clearly while the issue was live? Did they follow up after closing the ticket, or did they close it and disappear? The answer to this question tells me more about a vendor than any product demo. "What do you know now that you wish you had known before signing?" This question works because it is framed as advice, not criticism. Reference customers who would never say "this product has problems" will happily answer this one honestly. Listen for anything about pricing surprises, scope limitations that only appeared after deployment, or feature gaps the sales team glossed over. "When you renewed, did you evaluate alternatives?" Renewal is the honest signal. A customer who renewed without looking elsewhere is genuinely satisfied. A customer who looked at three other options and came back is someone who chose this vendor over real competition. A customer who is approachin

The hype cycle for AI adoption in businesses often follows a familiar, and often frustrating, trajectory. It begins with the undeniable allure of a powerful new tool—seeing ChatGPT effortlessly summarize documents or Copilot intelligently autocomplete code is undeniably impressive. The immediate reaction is almost universally: "We need to get AI." So, tools are procured, workshops are run, and initial enthusiasm soars. Yet, more often than not, six months down the line, that excitement has waned, and the needle on actual business transformation hasn't moved. The fundamental operational rhythm of the organization remains unchanged. As a Senior IT Consultant and Digital Solutions Architect with over a decade of experience, I've observed this pattern repeatedly across various client engagements. This isn't a failure of the technology itself, but rather a profound strategy failure . It’s the single most common and costly mistake I encounter in AI adoption today. The Critical Distinction: Tool Acquisition vs. Strategic Integration Think of buying an AI tool like purchasing a state-of-the-art machine for a workshop. Its inherent value is immense, but if it sits in a corner, unused or without a defined process around it, that value remains entirely theoretical. It's an expense, not an asset generating return. Real AI integration , on the other hand, is a disciplined, multi-faceted endeavor. It's about deeply understanding your existing business processes, meticulously identifying precisely where intelligent automation can create genuine, measurable leverage. It involves designing a holistic system that delivers this leverage, and critically, establishing robust mechanisms to measure the actual outcomes against predefined business objectives. This holistic approach is strategy. The tools—be it an LLM, a specific AI platform, or an automation suite—are merely components that strategy carefully selects and orchestrates to achieve a greater aim. Where AI Integration Truly Crea

I built a knowledge graph out of my own work sessions. Hundreds of them — transcripts of me building a system with LLMs, extracted into concepts, decisions, findings, and the edges between them. For a while it felt like the thing was working. I'd query it, get back a clean structured answer, and move on. Then I ran a foreign model against it. I gave a different model my concept definitions and asked it to reconstruct the system, both the vocabulary and the relationships. It recovered 97.7% of the words. It recovered 61.1% of the structure. That 36-point gap was the first time I could see the problem instead of just living inside it. The vocabulary transferred because the definitions were written carefully. The edges didn't, because the edges were the part I'd let the extraction handle. And the whole time, querying the graph had felt complete. The structure came back typed, connected, confident-looking — so I stopped looking. I started calling it premature retrieval closure: the retrieval returns something shaped like a whole answer, which is exactly why I didn't notice the parts that were missing. Part 10 of Building at the Edges of LLM Tooling . If you're running a long-term project through an LLM-backed memory system (anything that turns raw sessions into structured, persistent memory), this is about the step where the structure starts lying about how complete it is. Start here . Why It Breaks Every memory system of this kind does the same move. An LLM reads raw interaction (a conversation, a document, a session log) and lifts structured memory out of it: entities, facts, rules, summaries. That structured memory becomes the thing the agent reads later, instead of the raw record. The lift is where fidelity goes. Pulling clean structure out of messy text means making decisions the text didn't make explicit: which entity this pronoun refers to, whether a relationship is real or inferred, what to keep and what to drop. Those decisions can be wrong, and when they are,

IBM and HashiCorp have announced new LDAP secrets management capabilities in IBM Vault Enterprise 2.0, introducing a redesigned architecture to manage LDAP credentials, support password rotation, and automate the identity lifecycle. By Craig Risi

Why This Deserves More Attention Than It Gets Credential leaks are one of the most common and preventable security incidents in software. Bots actively scan GitHub for newly pushed API keys, database URLs, and private credentials — and they find them within minutes of a commit going public. Rotating compromised credentials is painful, and in some cases the damage is done before you even realize what happened. This isn't just an enterprise problem. It happens on solo side projects, open-source repos, and internal tools at startups. And the root cause is almost always the same: someone treated secrets like regular configuration and didn't have a clear strategy for keeping them out of version control, logs, and error messages. The patterns in this guide aren't bureaucratic overhead. They're the minimum viable approach for any app that talks to a real database or a real API. What Environment Variables Actually Are An environment variable is a key-value pair that lives in a process's environment — a set of values the operating system makes available to any running program. Every process inherits the environment of the process that spawned it. In Node.js, you access them through process.env : const port = process . env . PORT ; const dbUrl = process . env . DATABASE_URL ; In Python: import os port = os . environ . get ( ' PORT ' ) db_url = os . environ . get ( ' DATABASE_URL ' ) The core idea — and the reason env vars are the standard approach — is that they decouple what the app does from where it runs . The same application code can point at a local development database or a production cluster. The code doesn't change; only the environment does. This is the heart of the 12-Factor App principle: store config in the environment, not in the code. The .env File: What It Is and What It Isn't In local development, you don't set environment variables by hand before every terminal session. Instead, you use a .env file — a plain text file at the root of your project with one key

Every weekday, we averaged 10 groups. Every weekend, 15. Same karaoke bar. Same staff. Same songs. For a long time, I just accepted that gap as "normal." Weekends are busier. That's just how hospitality works, right? Wrong. It took me years to realize I wasn't looking at a staffing problem. I was looking at a funnel problem — and I had no idea what a funnel even was. The moment I noticed something was off One Tuesday afternoon, a group of four walked past the front door, looked at the menu board outside, and kept walking. I watched from the counter. I had open rooms. Competitive prices. Cold drinks. Everything they needed. But they left anyway. That one moment stuck with me. Why did they walk in? Why did they look? Why did they leave? I started tracking these moments obsessively. Not with software — just a notebook and a lot of attention. Here's what I found over six weeks: Weekdays : About 40 people walked past who paused at the sign. Of those, maybe 15 came to the door. Of those, 10 groups actually came in and paid. Weekends : About 90 people paused. 30 came to the door. 15 groups booked a room. The conversion rate was almost identical — roughly 25% from "stopped to look" to "became a customer." The difference wasn't that we were worse at converting on weekdays. We just had fewer people at the top. That's a funnel. I didn't know the term at the time. But what I was describing is exactly what marketers call a marketing funnel : Awareness — people notice you exist Interest — they stop to look Consideration — they walk to the door, check the price Action — they book a room and pay Most businesses obsess over the bottom of the funnel. Better sales scripts. Discount campaigns. Loyalty cards. I did the same. I ran Tuesday specials. I trained staff to upsell drinks. I rearranged the menu. None of it closed the gap. Because the gap wasn't at the bottom. It was at the top. On weekdays, I simply had fewer people aware we existed. What I tried instead Once I framed it as a f

I and I imagine a lot of other folks, don't believe the future of work should be a smaller group of executives commanding a larger system of people and machines. We have seen what AI can do not just to software product quality without guardrails, but to the junior and midlevel team members who are laid off or never hired at all in exchange for better profit rates with AI tokens vs human salaries. That is just the old hierarchy with better software. The history of work has always had this tension. You can go back to the start of US history and look at the military, commissioned officers were trained and trusted to command while enlisted service members carried out the work and risk. In the corporate and business world, executives and managers became the people who planned, measured, and optimized, while workers became the people being measured. Those structures were not only about class, but race and in America they were built inside a society already shaped by racism, classism, unequal education, unequal access to capital, and unequal access to leadership. AI now forces us to confront that history again. If we are not careful, AI will not flatten organizations. It will make the hierarchy invisible. Instead of a manager with a clipboard, we will have an algorithm. Instead of a foreman with a stopwatch, we will have dashboards, productivity scores, automated performance reviews, and AI systems that decide who gets opportunity and who gets replaced. That is not progress. The goal should not be to replace people with AI. The goal should be to replace bureaucracy, repetitive work, bad process, and unnecessary gatekeeping. What I am trying to do at Buildly is simple: AI should remove drudgery, not dignity. Automation should increase agency, not surveillance. Productivity gains should be shared, not extracted. Hierarchy should be functional, temporary, and accountable — not a measure of human worth. This is why we talk about AI-native product development differently. An AI

Hello Dev.to Hello everyone, This is my very first post here at Dev.to. I am curious about how companies go about running their business in the backstage and, specifically, what kind of challenges do they face in their inventory management, warehousing, workplace technologies, and overall business systems. There have been plenty of times that I witnessed how little operational inefficiencies turn into big business problems when left untreated for too long. I intend to share my observations and learnings regarding the topics of inventory management, asset management, workflow improvement, and business systems used by companies to keep themselves organized and efficient. Please note that I am not here to pretend having all the right answers. It's simply an attempt at learning and exchanging ideas within the industry. See you around!

OpenAI details Codex Windows sandbox architecture, showing how SIDs, ACLs, restricted tokens, and dedicated sandbox accounts enable safe execution of autonomous coding tasks. The design balances isolation with real developer workflows and shows how OS security primitives must be composed for AI agents on local development environments. By Leela Kumili

A few weeks back I had an agent reconciling a vendor list. It ran clean. No error, no crash, output...

Ramp has nearly tripled its valuation over the past year as investors scramble to grab a part of the fast-growing startup.

Node.js will change its release schedule starting with version 27 in October 2026, moving from two major releases per year to one. All releases will become Long-Term Support (LTS), removing the distinction between odd and even versions. An Alpha channel for early testing will also be introduced. This decision addresses maintenance challenges and aims to align with user needs. By Daniel Curtis

This article was originally published on davidohnstad.com . I cross-post here to reach the Dev.to community. { " @context ": " https://schema.org ", " @graph ": [ { "@type": "Person", " @id ": " https://davidohnstad.com/#author ", "name": "David Ohnstad", "url": " https://davidohnstad.com ", "sameAs": [ " https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidohnstad/ ", " https://orcid.org/0009-0007-9023-7456 ", " https://davidohnstad5.mystrikingly.com/ ", " https://github.com/davidohnstad40-netizen ", " https://hashnode.com/@davidohnstad ", " https://davidohnstad.com ", " https://davidohnstad.net ", " https://davidohnstad.info ", " https://david-ohnstad.com ", " https://davidohnstadminnesota.com " ], "jobTitle": "Senior Data Product Manager", "worksFor": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Veeam Software", "url": " https://www.veeam.com " }, "alumniOf": { "@type": "CollegeOrUniversity", "name": "College of St. Scholastica" }, "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "addressLocality": "Duluth", "addressRegion": "MN", "addressCountry": "US" }, "description": "Senior Data Product Manager at Veeam Software, MS and MBA from the College of St. Scholastica, based in Duluth, Minnesota. Specializes in data architecture, AI/ML integrations, and SaaS platform development." }, { "@type": "Article", " @id ": " https://davidohnstad.com/data-product-manager-org-structure-reporting#article ", "headline": "Data Product Manager Org Structure: Reporting Lines That Matter", "description": "David Ohnstad reveals where data product managers actually fit in org charts and why reporting lines determine success. Real insights from a data PM restructure.", "url": " https://davidohnstad.com/data-product-manager-org-structure-reporting ", "datePublished": "2026-05-29T14:06:18Z", "dateModified": "2026-05-29T14:06:18Z", "author": { "@type": "Person", " @id ": " https://davidohnstad.com/#author " }, "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "David Ohnstad", "url": " https://davidohnstad.com ", "logo": { "@type"