What is a token
AI is meant to seem like magic. But there's no such thing as magic. It's all illusion. So, allow me to spoil that illusion for you.
Jennifer++
Sociotechnical systems thinking
Latest posts
Reviewing "How AI Impacts Skill Formation"
It's a weak study, but it still has interesting findings
I want to go home
I wrote this 7 years ago, a week or two before I started hormone replacement therapy. I shared it with a few people at the time, but never really published it anywhere. I really should have. Homesick Did you ever go to summer camp, or even just a sleepover at
Gresham's law of programming
Or, bad code drives out good
Test using OpenTelemetry traces in Asp.Net
Taking advantage of our OpenTelemetry tracing to easily test behavior that is otherwise very hard to observe
The free software commons
Free and open source software has become a modern commons, but now it's vulnerable. Freedom isn't sufficient to secure it for the future.
Letterbook - No universal translators
It turns out that federating is really hard. But, I managed it. Now I would love to have your help with everything that comes after that.
Letterbook
We build tools, but we are also shaped by the affordances of those tools. I'm building Letterbook. I would like it if you join me.
Mental maps, part 2: incidents and observability
We map the system so that we can change the system, so then we must remap the system. That's the tight inner loop of software development.
Complex vs complicated
A quick and practical summary of what it means for a system to be complex, or not.
Mental maps for navigating software systems
Learning and exploration in complex systems happens continuously, forever. We need to constantly update our mental maps, or they'll lead us astray
Losing the imitation game
AI cannot develop software for you, but that's not going to stop people from trying to make it happen anyway. And that is going to turn all of the easy software development problems into hard problems.
Automate Thyself
For quite some time, my own ops haven't had much dev in them. But I'm changing that.
Advent of Code in Production, Day 13: Observability
At this point we've designed a system and we're going to provide it as a service. To operate that service effectively we have to understand how its behaving. That's all about observability.
Advent of Code in Production, Day 7: Incident Review
If Advent of Code was a whole system, it might look like this. Of course, the first deployment of a complex system is never smooth. This is a review of that incident.