Blogs

There’s a familiar anxiety in the air among software architects and engineering leaders. AI coding tools are going to make us lazy programmers. They’ll erode our fundamental skills. We’ll lose the ability to think through problems. Sound familiar? It should. I’ve heard this exact song before, just with different verses. In the ’90s, visual development environments were going to create a generation of developers who couldn’t “really” code. Before that, higher-level languages were supposedly making us soft. Hell, I remember when debuggers were contentious—Linus famously ranted that real kernel developers should be able to think through their code without stepping through it line by line. ...

We’ve all seen the ergonomic warnings. Adjust your monitor height. Take breaks every twenty minutes. Use a proper keyboard. The IT department sends out reminders about repetitive strain injuries, and we dutifully nod while hunching over our laptops for another six-hour coding session. But here’s what nobody talks about: your brain is a muscle too, and we’re giving it the cognitive equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome. The thinking muscle I’ve been writing software for over twenty years, and I’ve watched my industry evolve from “ship it when it’s done” to “ship it yesterday, fix it tomorrow.” Somewhere along the way, we forgot that thinking—real, deep problem-solving—is physical work. Your brain burns glucose. It gets fatigued. It needs recovery time. ...

I sat down a few weeks ago to ask Claude to help me analyze some user feedback data. I spent fifteen minutes crafting what I thought was the perfect prompt: > Please analyze this data, but don't make assumptions about causation, don't over-interpret small sample sizes, don't use corporate jargon, don't suggest solutions we can't implement, and definitely don't... The response was generic and cautious. Frustrated, I tried again with a simple request: ...

This is the 42nd version of my personal website and weblog, once again self-hosted at Dreamhost. I use the site as a forcing function; a way to learn various languages and tools, and a kick to get back into the habit of writing and publishing. This year I ported the content from Write.as to a self-hosted Hugo setup, which took about a day. Everything about Hugo has been better than expected, and the only hiccup was on the hosting side (SSL setup was broken for a few hours). ...

There is a point in your career where you start to weigh what you want to say with what you can and should say. If you’re not careful, it can paralyze and stunt your ability to hold opinions with conviction. I suspect that the difference between our inner voice and where it comes from, versus what we know we should sound like, is one of the primary causes of imposter syndrome, and possibly contributes to a cycle of burnout. I find the more disconnected my inner voice is from my external persona (and the longer there is dissonance), the less I feel like myself. ...