This is my cool site
The Bottomless Well of Engineer Suffering The rise of agent-driven development has coincided with inflated expectations around what software engineering teams are capable of producing, given a set of resources and constraints. This, along with a fundamental shift in how tech organizations operate , has resulted in a whiplash that engineers are struggling to adapt to. The token cost to build a…
Now that I’ve reached a steady state at the new job (6+ months in) I’m starting to revisit some old ideas in a new way, which is very exciting because the phase I find myself uttering is “what was I thinking doing it like that”. Your former self was a fumbling idiot with no understanding of the world and your current self is infinitely more capable of solving the thing that…
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.” said Jojen. “The man who never reads lives only one.” George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons I love to read, but it’s never felt like enough. Consumption fuels passion for the arts but my practice has always been seated in the act of creation. Modern culture is filled to the brim with content for consumption, but…
Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time, for decisions and revisions, which a minute shall reverse The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot The internet at our 90’s-era office has been a temperamental wench for the last few months we’ve been here. Added to the office decor of a failed artist’s scribbles, floral linoleum, and curtains that look like they…
I’ve said it before and will say it again: the internet is the greatest engineering achievement that has ever existed. Sure, you can argue that antiseptics and such have had a greater role in advancing civilization, but there’s something to be said for the remarkable harmony by which a system of protocols written in the 60s, 70s, and 80s work to distribute information across the…
It’s hard to believe that it’s only been 6 months since the MCP revolution began when OpenAI announced that they were adopting the standard developed at Anthropic. The itch to dive into this topic has been buzzing around the back of my brain for months, and I finally have a free weekend to dive in! A few weeks ago, I was at a Dagger event in SF where Kyle Pendfound gave a demo using…
tap-tap-hold-release capital letters rising like digital breath. metacognition for anyone with half a brain, some portion of that brain power ought to be spent thinking about thinking. in particular, thinking about how easy it easy to fool oneself. we often act then explain away our impulses through mental gymnastics. like all things worth doing in life, good habits ward against evil spirits…
I took the recent Hugo templating update that seems to have broken just about every theme as an opportunity to refactor my Hugo implementation and switch to a theme I’ve been eyeing for a while: LoveIt . The formatting and default aesthetics are very nice, and the theme is actively maintained. Plus, I’ve recently become obsessed with Mermaid diagrams (often with the help of Claude!)…
Hello world! It’s been a minute. I’ve been busy with a new job – my mind hasn’t had time to wonder from the immediate tasks at hand. A conversation about code generation and its role in modern software development prompted the following line of thinking. Is Software Engineering “Real” Engineering? There’s something interesting happening in the world of…
I remember a colleague asking me, while in the middle of a hypergrowth phase at a startup, how I solved problems at the company. I responded, “I have a map of all the technical experts in the company living in my head.” Of course, his followup was: “Can you write it down for me?” A friend recently asked me to explain “multimodal data, data curation, common data model,…