What Playing Poker Taught Me
Lessons about risk, variance, and reading people from four years of playing poker seriously.
jshah
Latest posts
Just Talk to It
Why I dictate my prompts to LLMs instead of typing them, and why the results are better.
Six Components That Make Interfaces Feel Alive
Six live, interactive UI components I came across exploring popular UX libraries, and the small detail that makes each one feel good.
The AI Headcount Equation
A look at the real costs of adopting AI: the headcount cuts that fund it, the extra output you get back, and why the payoff is so hard to measure.
The Iterative Developer in the AI Era
Why shipping an imperfect first draft works so well with AI tooling, and what a company must do to support it.
My AI Dev Workflow
A layered AI development setup: Claude Code as the foundation, with custom skills, plugins, MCP servers, and multi-agent orchestration on top.
Collaboration vs Innovation
Constant collaboration and breakthrough innovation pull against each other. How to get the best of both.
Early Learnings as a Staff Engineer
Observations from my first six months as a staff engineer, on alignment, influence, and impact.
The Zettelkasten Method
A note-taking method for retaining and recalling what you learn, and the software that makes it work.
Build for the User
A short list of questions that keep your software focused on what actually works for the people using it.
Encapsulate for Easy Refactors
How encapsulating logic today makes tomorrow's refactor easy, shown by extending a Rails role into its own model.
A Developer's Guide to Processes
What a process actually is: memory layout, states, the control block, process creation, and interprocess communication.
My Essential Mac Applications
The Mac apps I rely on every day, grouped by productivity, entertainment, and development.
Thread Safe Connection Pool in Ruby
Building a thread-safe connection pool with class instance variables, a Mutex, and the connection_pool gem.