It is March! That means another exciting roundup of all the things I think are neat. Let’s go.

1. Collection of insane and fun facts about SQLite (5 minutes)

Did you know SQLite is the most deployed and most used database? That three people maintain it? Or, that it’s so fast it competes with fopen. This article reshaped my expectations of SQLite and what it’s capable of. It’s also interesting when paired with the work fly.io is doing on LiteFS (a FUSE file system that replicates SQLite transactions over a network). SQLite is not the little toy database engine I mistook it for.

2. Delta: A syntax-highlighting pager for git

If you use git on the command line, this tool is for you. I was a diff-so-fancy for a long time, but I wanted proper syntax highlighting. Trying to read diffs in red/green text is painful and unnecessary for 2025. Delta will make all your git commands have proper syntax highlighting. It supports many popular themes and is easy enough to extend if yours is missing.

3. Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (3 minutes)

One of my favourite quotes in Continuous Delivery was something to the effect of:

Scripts are documentation that you can execute

In this article, Dan introduces the idea of a “do-nothing script”. Instead of documenting the steps for your manual toil processes, you put them in a script. When you run the script, it tells you what to do. Maybe one day you have an idea for automating one of the 6 steps and you add it to the script. I use this technique for a variety of tasks, but I’d make an argument for using Bash over Python.

4. Stop Reading News (4 minutes)

I’m sure this one will be nothing new for all you Cal Newport fans. News is only one of the many distractions we deal with in our lives. Hell, this newsletter fits in that category. The message of practicing slow information, upgrading your resources are focusing on signals are key to reining in your attention.

5. Video: LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively

This video is so good I could write an entire blog post on it. Maybe sometime later this year? Larry McEnerney gives a great talk on what makes your writing valuable (spoiler: it needs to solve problems). He also has great tips on what not to do, which you likely are doing and don’t realize. Writing for school != writing for the real world.

6. Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops (15 minutes)

This is a transcript of a talk (never could find the video) given by Fred Hebert (Staff SRE @ Honeycomb.io). First, the author mentions a paper by Ruthanne Huising called “Moving off the Map”. The study highlights how detailed knowledge of organizational operations can simultaneously empower and alienate employees, influencing their career trajectories and perceptions of their organizational roles. Anyone trying to follow along on the Staff Engineering career track will probably benefit in understanding the differences in a company’s nominal vs emergent structure. Your only power for change is your influence, know how it works.

The second part is about how to embrace the complexity of it all. All these lessons are great and hit on all kinds of different areas. Project scoping, psychological safety, and metrics are all key to a team’s success. And most importantly “It’s hard to change outcomes without changing the pressures that foster them”.