We start our day with a report on re/code about Microsoft giving up on consumer smartphones. Part of this is the impending layoffs of about 2000 jobs. Stratechery talks about the curse of culture and how it affects your business. Culture is a frequent topic here because it affects everything at your job, how coworkers collaborate or not, how sales are won or not, and who gets rewarded or not. Johanna Rothman has an excellent post on when Agile is wrong for you. Most of the post seems like common sense, but there are too many companies that still focus on the wrong things when “going agile”. Atlassian announced BitBucket Pipelines, so you can now have continuous delivery right inside of BitBucket. It looks like this might be replacing some of their cloud CI products, but that is not entirely clear yet.

As always, enjoy today’s items, and please participate in the discussions on these sites.

Startups, Career and Process

• When is Agile Wrong for You? | Johanna Rothman
• Advice for managing software development? | Allan Kelly
• The Curse of Culture | Stratechery
• Solve Small Problems | DaedTech
• Microsoft is giving up on consumer smartphones, too | re/code

Design and Development

• The Elixir of concurrency | Carlos Fenollosa
• Akka Notes – Finite State Machines – 2 | Java Code Geeks
• Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room | AkitaOnRails
• Escaping Technical Debt With Agile Methodology | DZone Agile
• Constructor Function: Scala | DZone Java
• The surprising cleverness of modern compilers | Daniel Lemire
• A better way to structure D3 code | Elliot Bentley
• So You Want to Be a (Compiler) Wizard | -dealloc

Concurrency, Performance and Scalability

• Is reference counting slower than GC? | Musing Mortoray
• Memory Leaks and Resource Management in Swift and iOS | Basem Emara
• An assignment framework for optimizing distributed systems operations on social networks | the morning paper

AI, Machine Learning, Research and Advanced Algorithms

• Develop Your First Neural Network in Python With Keras Step-By-Step | Machine Learning Mastery
• Kalman filters and bottom-up learning | John D. Cook
• Apache Spark Machine Learning Example with Scala | Java Code Geeks
• Metrics To Evaluate Machine Learning Algorithms in Python | Machine Learning Mastery

Big Data, Visualization, SQL and NoSQL

• StreamScope: Continuous reliable distributed processing of big data streams | the morning paper

Infrastructure, Operations and DevOps

• Bitbucket Pipelines Beta: continuous delivery inside Bitbucket | Atlassian Blogs

Link Collections

• Double Shot #1690 | A Fresh Cup
• Dew Drop – May 24, 2016 (#2258) | Morning Dew