software engineering musings
In July, I joined two of my cousins and two of their friends on a 500-mile ride from Target Field in Minneapolis to Wrigley Field in Chicago over the course of a week. Cousin B had just left a job after 16+ years and was doing a 2026 bike tour frenzy, so why not ride to Chicago to see the Twins play the Cubs? On a personal note, my cousins’ mother (my aunt) died of colon cancer 20 years ago, and…
In my advisory work, a common question I get from leaders goes something like, “how do I get my engineering team to care about [customers, shipping faster, quality]?” Their team is chasing the latest AI tool from Hacker News, polishing a low-value refactor, or holding an unstated quality bar that slips a deadline, and everyone is frustrated. For better and for worse, a team’s culture stems from…
As much as I enjoy writing software, I generally won’t unless I have a particular problem to solve, even if it’s a manufactured and silly problem to solve . I’ve been itching to try out this newfangled way of working with AI development tooling, and I finally found a complex problem to try it out! I write this post to capture my experience and reflections after building and shipping some real…
Of course, you can’t spell Matt Spitz without AI. I did some Cloudfront, Route 53, and ACM gymnastics, and now the default domain name for this website is mttsptz.ai . All of the links from mattspitz.me that my millions of followers have bookmarked still work – they’ll just redirect here. Welcome to the new revolution, where domain names cost $80/year for a dad joke. It’s worth every penny.
From April to June this year, I rode my bicycle across the United States, from Washington DC to the Oregon coast. The ride was solo and unsupported, meaning that I rode by myself and carried everything I needed on my bicycle. It was an incredible adventure and one I’ll never forget. By the numbers: 4026 miles 127318’ elevation gain 11539’ above sea level at Hoosier Pass in Colorado 58 days 14…
Earlier this month, I rode from Crescent City to San Francisco. Together with my 2009 ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles , I’ve now cycled almost the entire California coast. S is also a recently-unemployed engineering executive and was surprisingly game for this whimsical journey considering that he didn’t own a road bike until July. S is familiar with endurance training (marathons,…
I like to frame employee retention as tent stakes. When pitching a tent, one hammers tent stakes into the ground to keep the tent from blowing away in a brisk gust of wind. Similarly, in one’s employment, there are specific reasons, articulated or not, why someone sticks with a company. When reorgs, strategy shifts, and market downturns start ripping up some of the tent stakes, as long as someone…
It’s been about a decade since I’d relaunched this site on Jekyll , and the poor thing needed a visual refresh. The site was too text heavy, and the CSS was hacky and forced. I just rewrote tgifunk.com and kept up the momentum to redesign mattspitz.me . I’m still not a web developer, but I like to think that the code and the design are much cleaner than they were. Bootstrap v5 has a lot more…
I spent a lot of time at the West Portal library branch growing up, and when I went inside a few months ago for old time’s sake, the man behind the desk offered me a San Francisco Public Library Explorer Map. The map of San Francisco has a little gray circle for each of the city’s 27 libraries, at which one can pick up a unique sticker for that library. I’m currently unemployed and love silly…
Every few years, I update a document that lists my values, my modus operandi , and a few fun facts. Here’s my latest, written at Vanta in March of 2023. What I value Delivering customer value : Vanta exists because of its customers: they pay us to solve real problems for them, and they can just as easily take their business elsewhere if we’re not meeting their needs. In order to realize Vanta’s…