One of our clients sells lawn grass seed. So when someone tells me to touch grass, I can point them at the right category page. Occupational hazard of doing analytics: Ive spent this month counting other peoples behaviour. Chat opens. Product views. Refusals. Bytes in an address field. At some point you notice youre measuring everyone except yourself. So, unscientifically, over the last few weeks: Bugs I solved staring at the screen: several. Bugs I solved walking to buy bread: two. Bugs I solved in the shower: one, and it was the expensive one. The Cyrillic byte-limit thing - 60 bytes, not 60 characters - didnt come to me at the keyboard. Neither did the realisation that our own test scripts were being counted as customers trying to jailbreak an AI assistant. I dont think this is mystical. When you stop typing, you stop defending the theory youve spent two hours building. And most stuck problems arent missing information. Theyre an assumption nobody questioned, because everyone was too busy to stop. Which is a long way of saying that touch grass isnt a joke about logging off. Its a debugging technique with terrible branding. Anyway. Warm Tuesday in Kyiv, and Im going outside for twenty minutes. If youve been staring at the same error for an hour - the grass is right there. We even have it in stock. #Productivity #Debugging #Engineering

Some orders never arrived in the ERP. No error. No failed request. They were accepted, and then they simply weren't there. We built a middleware service connecting a European manufacturer's @Oracle ERP with their @horoshopua store. Stock and prices flow one way every 15 minutes, orders the other way every 5. Most of those orders went through fine. A few vanished quietly, and the logs showed nothing at all - which is the worst kind of evidence, because there's nothing to read. The cause: the address field in the ERP is limited to 60 bytes. Not 60 characters. Sixty bytes. A Ukrainian delivery address with a parcel locker number is about 44 characters. In Latin script that's 44 bytes and everything is fine. In Cyrillic, each character takes two - roughly 79 bytes. The limit was exceeded silently, and the record was dropped without complaint. Classic internationalisation trap. "60 characters" and "60 bytes" are the same number right up until your users write in Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic or Chinese - and then they're off by a factor of two. Two things I'd take from this: → Check field limits in bytes, not characters. Especially on systems designed decades ago in a Latin-only world. → Build the diagnostics before you need them. We can now show exactly what the ERP received in about two minutes, which is the difference between an investigation and a guess. What's the quietest bug you've caught — one that didn't crash, just silently ate data? hashtag#integration hashtag#erp hashtag#ecommerce hashtag#softwareengineering

I don't procrastinate on hard tasks. I procrastinate on undefined ones. "Fix the analytics" sat in my list for days. "Open the GTM container and count the tags" got done in an hour. Same job. The difference was that one of them told me where to put my hands. That's most procrastination at work, in my experience. Not laziness - ambiguity. The brain refuses to start because it can't see step one, and scrolling feels better than staring at fog. What actually helps me: → Shrink the task until it's boring. If it still feels heavy, it's still too big. "Write the report" becomes "list the five section headers." → Write the handoff note before you stop. On every project we keep a file that says exactly where we left off and what the next action is. Tomorrow-me doesn't have to reconstruct anything - that reconstruction cost is what makes people avoid reopening a task. → Separate deciding from doing. Two different modes, two different times of day. Deciding while doing is how an hour disappears. → Start with the worst version. A bad first paragraph is editable. A blank page is not. Where AI genuinely helps: it makes starting cheap. It'll turn a vague goal into a numbered list, draft the ugly first version you'll rewrite anyway, or explain the part you're quietly avoiding because you don't understand it. Ambiguity was the blocker, and that's exactly the thing it removes fastest. But here's the part nobody says out loud. AI is also the best procrastination machine ever built. Refining a prompt feels like work. Generating a fifth version of a plan feels like progress. Researching the perfect tool for a task is not the task. I've lost whole afternoons to activity that produced nothing, and it felt more productive than the afternoons that produced something. The test I use now: does this output change what I do in the next hour? If not, I wasn't working. I was warming up. What's your version of step one? #Productivity #AI #Leadership #FutureOfWork

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