puns, pizza, and performance reviews
Last Friday I had a shower thought about evals. An eval is a repeatable experiment on an LLM system: fixed inputs, one or more variants under test, and a scoring rule that turns outputs into numbers you can compare. That s what Claude tells me anyway. evaling can help you if you ve ever changed a prompt [ ]
For a while I thought I d lost my creativity. Maybe it was the busyness of work or my former employer being acquired in what some might consider a dramatic fashion. I d stopped programming in the evenings for fun. A few months back I found I felt creative again-partly because of AI tools. A small part [ ]
Navigating your engineering career can be difficult, and one thing that can be especially frustrating is working toward promotion. Career ladders, managers, mentors, projects, deadlines, peer feedback, annual reviews–the list goes on. How do you know what to focus on next? To make matters worse, you might receive mixed signals: peers tell you that you [ ]
Many tech companies are conducting layoffs thanks to economic conditions and over hiring. You may not have interviewed in a while and you might even find it intimidating. I’d like to share some suggestions based on my time as a hiring manager, and mistakes I’ve made interviewing. Some nuance up front: this is my perspective [ ]
The best teams I’ve been on have displayed high levels of ownership. Ownership is a cultural trait that helps teams avoid failure by providing people the agency to pick up important work. We’ll focus on unmanaged work in this post because that’s the sort of work that is often dropped, and talk a bit about [ ]
I shared a Tweet with a photo of my current work setup and a few folks asked what I use so I thought I d put together a blog post with all the hardware on my desk. I have conflicting goals in choosing the gear I use to do my work. For instance, I want to [ ]
Code review is great way to maintain and improve your team’s codebase, and like a lot of team process having an intentional, positive culture around it makes it better. One of my earliest patches at Twitter was adding a short-lived token-based system for logged out requests (think login, signup, etc.). The patch itself wasn t so [ ]
Early in my career I thought showing my worth on a team meant having my ideas win. I was far too attached to those ideas, which left me frustrated when they weren t chosen and worst of all made working with others more difficult. Over time I learned the right approach wasn’t to dictate solutions, but [ ]
Earlier this year I was asked if some engineers from our team could help build a newly prioritized project. Doing so meant putting our team s current work at substantial risk of failure. I knew canceling our project was the right thing to do because the incoming request was more important and because continuing our current [ ]
Some time back my team was asked to take up a critical project on short notice. My product manager and I found out about the project on Monday evening and we were told it needed to ship on Friday the same week to 3 client platforms with a small team. We had just four days [ ]
The other day I was chatting with a friend who is both very competent and early in their software engineering career. They had noticed it sometimes took others less time to solve problems than it took them, and when they d ask for help, these folks knew the answer or could often point them in the [ ]
People have different value systems. Someone may value very expensive headphones, or cameras and you may value sneakers. Someone may value working really hard, and you may value having time to live and travel. It’s best to not push your value system onto others, because it can harm relationships. It’s okay and good that people [ ]
Note: I wrote the following note over a year ago, but only recently decided to send it to my newsletter. I m not sure why I sat on it so long. Your [respectful] thoughts are welcome on Twitter. Empathy doesn’t always come easy, but it goes a very long way toward building trust with those around [ ]
Did you know the swift-llbuild project contains a debugging tool called llbuild-ui that can find dependency cycles in your iOS build? To try it: Enable the New Build System (In Xcode it s under File, Workspace Settings) Build your project Open the Derived Data directory on your machine and find the build.db file generated by the [ ]
Xcode 9 includes a new build system that can substantially improve build times. The new build system is more strict about build issues, but some of its diagnostic output can be difficult to reason about. One difficult to debug error is Dependency cycle between targets, which may appear during incremental builds where you may not [ ]
I ve spent a bit of time with notification extensions in iOS 10 and they re pretty great. If you re not familiar with notification extensions, check out Apple s Introduction to Notifications talk before reading this post. Anywho, notification extensions improve your app s notification experience giving you a chance to mutate notification payloads, download and display media, and [ ]
I m republishing this article here so I can reference it later. I recently needed a way to perform an unknown number of asynchronous http requests and wait until they were all done before proceeding. dispatch_groups are a neat feature of Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) that made this easy to do. There are a couple of [ ]