Eat your vegetables!

Hello!

Writing in the midst of a lovely, family- and friends-filled weekend, including time with R+D beside the Ottawa River and a party for T. Tomorrow’s back to reality, so we’ll enjoy the beauty of the day while we have it.

It’s been a good week for posts discussing best practices for digital government or software teams generally—the kind of good practices, like eating your vegetables, that keep us all in better condition overall:

• I’ve got a new canon for explaining project vs. product funding, thanks to Jen Pahlka. (via Sean) The charts do wonders to point out how different timeframes for comparison shift our understanding of what’s more or less risky. The recent follow-up is good, too, with some important reminders about the nature of product funding.
• Lorin Hochstein’s summary of the CRTC Rogers outage report brings his delightful perspective of “but here are some nuanced concepts from resilience engineering” to the report.
• Amanda Clarke and Sean Boots’s paper on federal government IT contracting is out in pre-print. That page includes links to previous coverage of the issue to give context—I highly recommend you read the paper if you work in the space. Excitingly, it’s received some media coverage!

Time to go prep some food! We’ve been getting chard in our Odd Bunch boxes recently, which I’ve mostly only stir fried in the past. We recently tried a recipe for chard salad with feta / apple / almonds, and it’s been a hit.

On the subject of vegetables, T showed me the vegetable orchestra video the other day—apparently this did the rounds big time when it came out years ago but I’ve never seen it and it’s so delightful, well worth a few minutes to watch. (Okay, I suppose this isn’t entirely in the theme of “Eat your vegetables!”, but it’s a good use of some vegetables nonetheless!)

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas