Software engineering leader and occasional side project hacker
One of the motivational phrases I tell myself at work when some aspect of leadership is hard or unpleasant is “That’s the job!” Can a simple line from a Tom Cruise action movie be a useful tool for navigating difficult times at work? Let’s find out. When and how to use it I often use this phrase on myself when I’m stressing over some aspects of my job. As an engineering leader, most parts of the…
Both GitHub Copilot and Claude Code support remote-control sessions from their mobile apps — meaning you can kick off work on your laptop, walk out the door, and keep supervising the agent from your phone. I tried this with both, and it worked better than I expected. Copilot and Claude Code both can “remotely control” a session from their respective mobile apps. All the work context happens on…
“You Can Just Do Things” is a simple idea making the rounds on social media: you don’t need permission to act, build, or create. It’s a reminder to favor doing over overthinking. Lately it’s been showing up everywhere — in Twitter threads, book titles, and at work — and I’ve found it genuinely useful as a personal nudge to take initiative. Another term that can apply here is “ Personal agency ”,…
People often panic when two managers give slightly different answers. The instinctive reaction is “something is wrong” or “we’re disjointed.” But in distributed systems, we accept temporary mismatches as a necessary trade-off for speed—a concept known as eventual consistency. Instead of treating every management inconsistency as a failure, what if we viewed leadership teams like distributed…
At Palm Computing, we worked against hardware manufacturing schedules that made software deadlines absolute. To avoid the dreaded “black box” of development where stakeholders only see the result at the bitter end, we implemented Feature Reviews. These regular check-ins did more than just report status; they forced transparency, mitigated risk, and became a crucial tool I still use with my teams…
While often overshadowed by full browser extensions, bookmarklets remain a powerful, privacy-friendly tool for automating repetitive web tasks. However, writing and formatting the necessary JavaScript can be tedious. I recently built a simple bookmarklet manager — using AI to speed up the process — that makes creating, identifying, and sharing these scripts much easier. What is a bookmarklet?…
I wanted a simple app to extract links from screenshots and used Claude Code to create a simple desktop application that did exactly that. This was my first time creating anything with the Electron cross-platform app platform and it worked quite well. My idea originated at work where I spend a lot of time in meetings and often people will be presenting Tableau dashboards or other documents without…
My Flickr photos account was a fun snapshot in time when I worked at Yahoo and before mobile phone cameras took over. This week I used AI to create a couple of scripts to help me get back down to the free account limit. Here’s a quick explanation of the process I followed along with a few Flickr memories. My time with Flickr I started using Flickr in late 2004 which was just prior to their…
Is it possible to “vibe code” a website from my phone while waiting for my turn at the barbershop? The answer as you might guess is yes! I recently created an event countdown website completely from my phone (no Wi-Fi) and got it launched in the 45 minutes while I waited for my turn in the chair! I’ve been wanting to create an “event countdown” style website for an upcoming wedding and picked it…
During the migration from WordPress to Eleventy, I decided against the Eleventy standard image transform plugin and decided to just implement the pieces I needed. One remaining piece was automating the compression of images for better web performance. I usually prepare images before adding to the blog by adjusting to the right size and image type. That means in this script I’m sticking with…