DevSum’s Post

Someone asked our codebase a question today. “Why was memory limit increased?” WhyLog answered it in seconds. Full summary. Exact reasoning. Files changed. Source PRs linked. No digging through Slack. No pinging the engineer who made the change. No guesswork. This is what happens when your codebase captures the why not just the what. Every PR. Every decision. Every tradeoff. Permanently attached to the code that caused it. Your team deserves answers, not archaeology.

Stepping back from this week’s posts. There’s a pattern that’s hard to ignore. We describe systems in terms of: requirements, functions and parameters. But the problems we struggle with most…don’t live there. They show up in: interactions timing combined conditions unexpected behaviours And we often end up reconstructing them after the fact. Almost as if something important was never stabilised early. Not more detail. Something else. Something that defines what must remain true as the system operates and evolves. Still exploring this. But it feels like the absence of that explains a lot of what we see. Designing systems that don’t require archaeology.

Have you ever opened a user guide from 2012? You scroll a little. Then a little more. And somewhere between outdated screenshots and retired workflows, you realize… This isn’t an update. It’s archaeology 🏺 At that point, the question changes. It’s no longer: “How do I update this?” It becomes: “What would actually make this useful today?” Because real documentation isn’t about preserving content. It’s about helping someone complete a task, make a decision, or avoid a mistake. Sometimes the best update… is a rethink. #TechnicalWriting #ProductDocumentation

Remember when on-call meant 6 tabs, 4 CLIs, and a Slack archaeology dig? A staff engineer compressed all that into a single Markdown file in git; with Claude Code, any teammate can run a six-system investigation in two minutes. We wrote up the pattern so you can copy it: capture tribal knowledge, wire the steps, and make on-call runnable. 👉 https://lnkd.in/eSUgKUD7

On Wednesday I wrote about a CS rep doing archaeology on a live renewal call — searching Slack, pulling recordings — because a concession made at close never made it into the system. 43k people saw it. Nobody said they'd solved it. Which made me wonder which camp most teams are actually in: 1. "This happens. We deal with it when it surfaces." 2. "We've tried to fix it. Hasn't really stuck." 3. "We've actually eliminated this upstream." My honest guess is most teams are somewhere between 1 and 2. Would love to hear from you on where you sit. #customersuccess #quotetocash #revops

Digital work is still being interpreted as if artifacts are the whole record. Documents, messages, and finalized outputs are treated as the primary evidence of what happened. Everything else, such as autosaves, sync artifacts, metadata residues, temporary files, etc., is often ignored or treated as noise. This creates a structural blind spot. Digital work does not form from artifacts alone. It forms through continuous interaction between human activity and system response. Those system responses leave traces. In Information Archaeology, those traces are treated as a formal evidence class: ecofacts. Ecofacts don’t describe what someone intended; instead, they describe how the environment behaved: • where activity intensified or paused • how systems handled concurrent changes • what constraints shaped the work • where drift began to appear • where loss or overwrite occurred Without this layer, reconstruction becomes simplified. Sequences appear cleaner than they were, environments disappear, and gaps are easy to overlook. Including ecofacts changes the model. Digital work can be read as something that formed over time through interaction, rather than a set of isolated outputs. Information Archaeology formalizes this through Ecofact-Based Reconstruction (EBR), establishing methods for treating environmental traces as structured evidence. InformationArchaeology.org #InformationArchaeology #DigitalWork #DigitalEvidence #Ecofacts #Provenance #Metadata #DigitalForensics #TrustworthyAI

New blog post! https://lnkd.in/dCdFiKNz "Socio-technical archaeology" is the practice of understanding a system by uncovering the history behind it. How tech, decisions, people, and context is connected. Most systems are shaped by past decisions that turn into architecture, constraints, and ways of working over time. Without that context, it’s easy to misunderstand what should be changed and why. This is especially useful when starting a new role as a leader. Before making changes, it helps to understand how the current system came to be. You can read the blog post here: https://lnkd.in/dCdFiKNz

Life hack #95 Artifact Archaeology (The "Sticky Note". Jan Chipchase in his book “Hidden in Plain Sight” highlights that the most honest data isn't in a database; it’s on a user’s desk. • The Skill: Look for the "Shadow System." If a user has a physical notebook to track AI-generated tasks, your "seamless" agentic flow has a gap. • The Action: Photograph the clutter. The clutter is the map of the user’s cognitive load.

📋 Month-end WIP review shouldn't feel like archaeology. If you're exporting to a spreadsheet to see what's unbilled, you're already a week late. ModernPM gives you a live, filterable WIP view — by client, by project, by staff member and more. Write up. Write down. Relieve. Move on. No spreadsheet required. 👇 #WIPManagement #CPA #RealizationRate #ModernPM

📰 Coming this month - Ingest The Heritage Science Data Service is launching a new digital repository deposit system! Ingest is designed to make archiving and sharing heritage science data quicker, easier, and more intuitive. The full launch is set for 28th April 2026.  (Don’t panic! Until then, all existing deposit methods will still work as usual) Improvements include:  🧪 Support for multiple file formats and all deposit sizes.  🧪 Automated metadata extraction using a single template.  🧪 Validation of files and metadata during deposition. The HSDS and ADS will be rolling out full training sessions to help you master the new systems, free of charge. Stay tuned – details will be announced over the next few weeks. Learn more: https://buff.ly/vXbIvc7 #HeritageScience #HSresearch #HSDS Archaeology Data Service