I want to understand how the world works. This blog tracks my growth, the things I've learned, and how I'm leveraging them to do epic things.
A few months ago, I overhauled our contracting infrastructure to support AI generated contracts, DOCX templates that fill in the things we’d need, and correct-but-unsupported DOCX detection1 Did you know there are legit DOCX to DOCX converters that convert google docs DOCX into microsoft word DOCX? And some services refuse to operate on one or the other. Insanity.
It’s been about 6 weeks since I joined Tano, and this is what my commit history looks like:
In my second week at Tano, I tried to add a simple feature. I got stuck because Claude made changes in the wrong place. Turns out, there were three different places in the codebase using almost the same frontend code, displaying slightly different UIs. It made the change to one I wasn’t aware of, so when I tried running it locally, nothing changed where I expected.
If I had to choose one moment that signifies the deepest shift in the last few years, it would be mid-2024 when I had my first and only panic attack. It was my body and mind finally protesting and giving up, being like, “Neil, fuck this shit. You are not seeing the signs, so I have to take some drastic measures.”
I recently came across a gnarly issue: Every morning we’d see a latency spike in our API for for about 7-8 minutes. More importantly, it happened for a small fraction of requests (0.1%), making it pretty hard to reproduce.
I spent a very long amount of time trying to figure out how to simulate a broken database connection in Django. The problem is that not only do you want raw cursors to timeout, but also all models accessing the database.
Recently, I’ve noticed an interesting failure mode in humans. Here are a few examples, can you tell what’s wrong?
When you take ownership of a project, something changes. You become responsible for everything that happens with the project.
The traditional funnel is a measurement device for, say, number of people converting in your product.
If there’s one epic idea Hey.com has, it’s the Newsletter Feed. Like a social feed, you can scroll through these newsletters, read what’s interesting, skip what’s not. It feels natural. It feels unlike regular email.