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The downside of hiring for cultural fit

For years, hiring for cultural fit has been a cornerstone of my recruitment strategy. The idea is simple: more than focusing only on skills, I focused on finding people who aligned with our company's values, norms, and practices to create a harmonious and productive work environment. This also means that I put a lot of focus on building a strong culture inside my team. Cultural fit However, when listening to Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant on the Work Life podcast, I had to re-think this approach as it highlighted the potential downsides of overemphasizing cultural fit. In the podcast Adam says that startups where founders put culture fit first, their organizations are dramatically less likely to fail. So culture fit clearly wins in terms of startups surviving and then going public. But studies have shown that after their IPO, these ‘culture fit’ firms grow at slower rates.  He thinks that what is happening is that early on when you have a really clear mission, it's very ...
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JetBrains AI Assistent–Ollama support

I talked about Ollama before as a way to run a Large-Language-Model(LLM) locally. This opens the door to try out multiple modals at a low(er) cost (although also a lower performance) and could be interesting if you are not allowed to share any data with an AI provider. For example you are a developer but your employer doesn’t allow you to use AI tools for that reason. If this is a use case that is relevant for you, than I have some good news for you. With the latest version of JetBrains AI Assistent(available in JetBrains Rider but also other IDE’s) you can now use Let me show you how to use this: Open JetBrains Rider(or any other IDE that integrates the JetBrains AI Assistent) Hit Ctrl-Alt-S or go to the Settings through the Settings icon at the top right   Go to the AI Assistant section under Tools Check the Enable Ollama checkbox. A warning message appears about Data Sharing with Third-Party AI Service Providers. Click OK to con...
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Ollama - Unable to locate runners

I'm a big fan of Ollama as a way to try and run a large language model locally. Today I got into trouble when I tried to connect to Ollama. When I tried to run Ollama through ollama serve I got the following error message: time=2024-12-02T21:15:55.398+01:00 level=ERROR source=common.go:279 msg="empty runner dir" Error: unable to initialize llm runners unable to locate runners in any search path I was able to fix the issue by going the AppData\Local\Ollama folder. There inside updates I found a new(er) version that I installed manually by executing the OllamaSetup.exe. After the setup completed, Ollama was running again as expected. More information Ollama
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Visual Studio 2022 17.12- Show inline return values while debugging

With the 17.12 version of Visual Studio 2022 there comes a feature that I was waiting to be added for a long time(and with long I really mean long). Of course you are wondering what feature I'm talking about. Let me first set the scene by showing you the class I want to debug: I created a small Calculator example. Notice that I'm using 2 different syntaxes(the regular syntax and expression-bodied method). This is not an accidental inconsistency from my side as you’ll see later. Now what if I wanted to debug the return values of these functions. Before the latest Visual Studio update I typically used a temporary variable to inspect the return values or took a look at the Autos window or the Watch window. With this release, you finally see the return statements inline in the editor window. Here is an example where I added the breakpoint at the end of the function: Unfortunately this doesn’t work (yet?) when using the expression-bodied method syntax, this is because ...
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C# 13–Implicit index access

New features keeps getting added to C#. With the release of C# 13 as part of .NET 9, you can now use the implicit index operator, ^ , to initialize a collection in reverse order. Before C# 13, you had to index elements from the front when using an object initializer. With the introduction of this operator, you get better readability and it  can help avoid potential off-by-one errors. More information What's new in C# 13 | Microsoft Learn
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Autonomy and loose coupling are not only an important characteristic for a software architecture

A utonomy in software design refers to the ability of a system or component to operate independently, making decisions and performing tasks without requiring other components or systems. Autonomy goes hand in hand with loose coupling , limiting the number of dependencies between components. These concepts are crucial for creating systems that are resilient, adaptable, and capable of handling complex tasks in dynamic environments. But could we apply the same concepts outside software design? Let's find out... Some observations If I showed you the following component diagram; what would be some observations, you could make?   Here are some of mine: Information is flowing up from components B, C and D to A. Probably there is some centralized decision making where most of the power is residing in component A. There is a high dependency on component A inside the system. Although without extra details we can misinterpret this diagram, but the risk exists that the co...
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Powershell - The profile for the user is a temporary profile

Today I investigated an issue we had in one of our build pipelines. For an unknown reason the build suddenly started to fail. In the build logs we found the following error message: ============================================================================== Generating script. Arguments passed sanitization without change. Formatted command: . 'D:\b\2\_work\135\s\Certificates\Import-PfxCertificate.ps1' -PfxFilePath ***2024.pfx -Password *** ========================== Starting Command Output =========================== "C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoLogo -NoProfile -NonInteractive -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Command ". 'D:\b\2\_work\_temp\e3fa7d9e-bd6e-490f-8f71-182a958e03d7.ps1'" Importing store certificate 'D:\b\2\_work\135\s\Certificates\***2024.pfx'... Exception calling "Import" with "3" argument(s): "The profile for the user is a temporary profile. ...
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