My name is Joe Mosby. I am a curious person, avid reader, and leader of engineering organizations. This blog is an ongoing representation of how I'm consider...
I think about work as a set of formal processes, like a production line. Not rigid, like an auto factory. More like a flexible machinist's shop or custom PCB design. You don't have 100% repeatability over and over, but you do have some repeatability infused with a bit of individual creativity and craft. When I think of AI, I'm fitting it into that structure. First, define a job to be done as a set…
Details Four weeks into my first-ever people management gig, 80% of my team quit. Some followed their old manager to a new gig. Others just decided the team shakeup wasn't for them. It stung. But before it stung, I was panicking. How were we going to get all this work done with 80% of the team? It wasn't pretty, and it definitely wasn't quite on time, but we got there. I had to beg for people from…
Consider an opportunity to join a secret society of brilliant, likable, highly-talented individuals. You can trust implicitly that if they say they’ll do something, they’re good for it. If you need support - financial, emotional, physical, or otherwise - they’re good for it. There’s no cost of admission beside the general expectation that if you can help another member, and it is within your…
The best software engineers are endlessly curious about how things work in a way that can bewilder other brain orientations. Once upon a time I attended a DEFCON talk given by an engineer who found three old wireless routers of unknown provenance, and he decided he wanted to figure out how they worked. He could tell the chips had 14 16-bit registers (similar to an 8086 chip), and he was able to…
Most coding agents still struggle when repositories hit a certain level of complexity. (Granted, many human agents struggle at this point, too.) CLAUDE.md patterns - my favorite coding tool - has a tendency to think it's operating within a single git repository. But most codebases of sufficient complexity to be meaningful stretch across multiple repos and use different languages, all while…
I wonder if we could create the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel today. We have the paints, and we certainly have the craftspeople. All of what was known to Michelangelo is known to us, as far as technique is concerned. We could create the physical artifact of paint on wood. But it would not be the Sistine Chapel. There is an element of human transcendence that permeates the Sistine Chapel. The…
"I'm a Millennial. You can't hurt me with financial despair." - Reddit user whichwitch9, one day after the Trump tariffs Tech has always been a team sport. Sure, it's easy to point at Jack Kilby as the individual inventor of the integrated circuit. It's a great story. Kilby doesn't have any summer vacation as he starts his job at Texas Instruments, so he spends his spare time fiddling with an idea…
"Hey. Steven. You're not on mute. Steven. STEVEN. Can you please mute yourself?" I was at a comedy show at the Lincoln Theater in DC on the night of March 12th, 2020. It was packed. The comic had flown in from Ireland, and I only remember one crack about people getting sick in China and Italy in an attempt to lighten the mood. A few of my coworkers had returned from a San Francisco conference…
“Strange memories on this nervous night in Denver. Eight years later? Nine? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle 2010s was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run ... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing…
Technology has always had two edges. A tool for farming or fishing becomes a weapon of war. And institutions, even in their best forms, always have to reckon with individual human fallibility. Twitter had never been particularly concerned with acting as an arbiter of truth. They saw themselves primarily as an engagement and commentary platform, never a news one. Yet as journalists and media…