Rian van der Merwe

It‘s been amazing to see our team come together to ship all of this in just a few weeks. If you want to talk observability for your site, hit me up!

Oh man. I ugly-cry-laughed my way through this. It's emotional and fun and heartfelt and sad and wholesome and hopeful. And it rocks very hard. Highly recommended.

An engineer recently sent me some questions about the #productmanagement role. I took a long time to respond because I saw it as a great opportunity to reflect on the role and what it means to me. I decided to share my answers here, in case it’s useful for anyone else! elezea.com/2025/06/prod...

“MCP Is RSS for AI” is a good analogy, but my analogy would be that MCP is like “Dynamic FAQs”, with the difference being that any question you ask could be considered “frequent” enough to be vetted and correct. thenewstack.io/mcp-is-rss-f...

I’ve been completely nerdswiped by MCP servers... here’s one I made for Lastfm. Use Claude Desktop to ask questions about your personal listening data. Try it out, let me know what I should add! github.com/rianvdm/last...

@richeholmes.bsky.social Hey, any chance you’ll ever move off Substack? I stopped giving them money, but will happily become a paid subscriber if you move to something like @ghost.org or @buttondown.com.

Love this take on the “10x engineer”. Ubuntu (the African principle, not the OS) strikes again… “I am because you are.” “It doesn’t matter how fast an individual engineer can write software. What matters is how fast the team can collectively write, test, […] and revise the software that they own.”

Any celebration of Reid Miles gets an automatic boost from me. Legend. “Miles fulfilled the Blue Note manifesto. His album covers pushed the envelope of graphic design just as the artists on the records inside continued to break new ground in jazz.”

This is a wonderful thread started by @ftrain.bsky.social, asking what makes your town special—but I’m obviously biased to @antichrista.bsky.social’s response.

Every once in a while a preorder shows up before release date and it’s always such a wonderful thing when that happens. Mdou Moctar’s band made a 4-track EP. It comes out on Friday but it showed up today and this thing goes so hard. It’s like post-punk desert blues.

I love this essay so much. I want to be this dad for my kids. “The single-most important thing he gave me, besides unconditional love, was modeling how to use music in my life.“

Interesting data on which movies aged poorly (and well), but it’s the genre data that stood out to me. “According to our rating-change data, horror movies age notably well, while comedy and drama see a marked decline in appraisal over time.” www.statsignificant.com/p/which-movi...

@taylorlorenz.bsky.social Hey there, just wanted to mention a data point that I would become a paid subscriber the moment you move off Substack, to something like Ghost or Buttondown.

@therealadam.com Hey there, I’m subscribed to your RSS feed and every article title shows up as “Adam Keys is Thinking”. If possible, it would be great to change that to a title That helps RSS readers like me quickly parse the topic. Thanks for considering!

I love this deep-dive on the little interjections we use in everyday speech. One example: “Other interjections serve as ‘continuers,’ such as ‘mm-hmm’—signals that the speaker should keep going. Because ‘mm-hmm’ is made with a closed mouth, it’s clear that the signaler does not intend to speak.”

I wrote a bit about the importance of “Visibility of System Status” in #productmanagement. elezea.com/2025/03/ack-...

This is a good @harper.lol primer on how to “brainstorm a spec, then plan a plan, then execute using LLM codegen.” If you have an idea for a product this is such a great way to get a working prototype out there.

This tracks (lol) and seems obvious, but the data is fun. “Younger listeners tend to exhibit a ‘discovery mindset,’ actively seeking novelty. Older listeners may approach streaming from a ‘maintenance mindset,’ knowing what they want and using a given platform to reinforce established preferences.”

Omg it’s a Gen X dream come true. The original “friend of the show” is back. Subscribed!

When @andrewliptak.com writes about Lord of the Rings, I pay attention. This is one if his best, y’all. “A critical theme throughout Tolkien’s work is the decline of a once-great people, with weak men failing to live up to the lives and stories of their predecessors.”

Struggling on new ways to say “no”, #productmanagement? This site might help. https://letsnotdothat.com/

Went to the Post Office today and get this—thanks to modern technology I got to listen to music on the way there and back! This is a game changer. Imagine always having 12 songs in your pocket!

I finally had a chance to make my way through this well-researched Spotify exposé, and dang it’s infuriating. “A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose.”

I wrote a little bit about the unhelpful language we sometimes use when teams "slip" on deadlines.

I am trying to read more books in 2025 so I am testing a theory that it’s the Kindle that puts me to sleep as soon as I open it. So here is an actual TBR pile! This year’s non-fiction theme is music. Fiction theme is all SF/F (with the exception of the new Orphan X novel because I love that guy).

@smore.bsky.social Thanks for your music discovery post, very useful! I am also heavily invested in Bandcamp. Also, I find the weekly www.allmusic.com email another good way to keep up with new releases. And the iOS app MusicHarbor alerts you of new releases by artists in your library.

I love reading end-of-year music wrap-ups from the personal blogs I follow, so this year I decided to make one of my own... elezea.com/2024/12/my-2...

Simon had me at #1 (totally agree that SOALW is such a gift). Going to spend some leisurely time with this excellent list over the next few days. I am also now really committed to get my list done in the coming week.

A reminder that we are now officially in Dead Week. Please act accordingly.

This is a really interesting rebuttal of modern parenting methods. “The job of a parent is not to prevent any potential trauma, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them.”

I own very few Christmas records, but this one is not only a very pretty splatter pattern, it’s also wonderful (not cheesy!) music. Highly recommended.

I love the Murderbot books, and this Martha Wells interview is a delight. “Of all her characters, Wells has said, Murderbot is the one she’s put the most of herself into. She feels a distance from other humans, even as she’s spent a life trying to relate to them, to understand them.”

Interesting stats here, and great commentary from @taylorlorenz.bsky.social. “We’ve officially entered the age where social media is more about entertainment and education than one-to-one personal connections.”

I look forward to this @smore.bsky.social post every year, and this year it’s such a banger. Personal music stats and reflections, followed by a deep dive on Spotify genres and why Wrapped wasn’t great this year? Yes please!

A great intro to a great essay about #jazz and what the genre is all about. “In the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley, Dickie Greenleaf, a jazz head living in the 1950s, owns a copy of Miles Davis’ Tutu, which was released in 1986.”

Oh, preach. This is why I obsess over my side project & reach out to indie Workers devs to see if I can help. “I'd forgotten what it feels like to make pull requests. There's a momentum to this sort of work because it doesn't rely on meetings or quarterly planning or going up the chain of command.“

This is brutal, but Ben knows Intel *so* well, so it's always enlightening to read his thoughts. TL;DR: The Board got cold feed about their foundry efforts. Ben also touches on something I've always wondered... why are massive company failures never *the Board's* fault? Who watches the watchmen?

Found some good advice in an old manual I was reading

This is my first time going deep and trying to understand what these drugs do, and it seems pretty amazing? “GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people's desires. They attack our acclimatization to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives.”

Another awesome use of @cloudflare.social Workers.

No surprises. “A new analysis estimates that over half of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated.”

I can’t event write a summary or grab my usual pull quote from this. Perfect post by @robinrendle.bsky.social. No notes.

Love this idea, and now I’m going to make a page like this on my site too! “WWIC” would be on my list as well, along with: www.anildash.com//2011/07/20/... www.npr.org/2011/04/18/1... www.43folders.com/2011/04/22/c...

Thankful that Jason saved me a click on this one.

@antichrista.bsky.social I assume I’m roughly the millionth person to send this to you, but... Playdate shoutout! www.usermag.co/p/have-we-re...

This is such a great concept for an interview (and you should read it), and now I want to know... what lyrics changed *your* life? I guess that’s a little dramatic, so it doesn’t have to be that serious. What lyrics have really stuck with you for a long time?