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Agentic development has fundamentally changed the software ecosystem. Modern coding agents are trained and prompted to seek out tools that will help with their assigned coding tasks. They will install those tools into their user’s environment, with little to no oversight on what the installed package actually does, relying on name pattern matching more than any other signal. This behavior is…
How do we model a political system? A ridiculously simplistic but often useful way to model a living body is as a three-part system. The body has inputs, a control mechanism, and outputs. The hand in the fire gets too hot, the nervous system goes “ yowch!”, the hand is pulled away. The ears sense vibrations that correspond to sounds, the brain hears “ what would you like to drink?”, the mouth…
In the early days of Python ’ s life, when it was newly hatched, one of the primary selling points was Python’s ability to fit into a systems programming stack, to interface fairly-cleanly with C-based programming. Even today, if you throw a brick at https://github.com/topics/c , you’re likely to hit a project with some Python scripts buried inside them, to help with building or deploying or…
I expected to cry in Portland. I fully expected that when the Andys would take the stage for the final time at XOXO 2024 I would start quietly sobbing in my seat. The fact that I left the tent to join the afterparty with my eyes slightly damp but not fully flooding surprised the hell out of me. So I’m going to do three things in this post. I’m going to explain what XOXO is, to me I’m going to…
This post is a rough recreation of a post from someone else that I saw years ago and now can’t find. If this rings a bell and you know the original, email phildini at phildini dot net. As a manager talking to your reports, you are always carrying a cannon and promising it won’t go off. That’s the one thing I want you to take away from this article, and I encourage you to go read it in its entirety…
I first read Guy Kawasaki’s “ The Art of the Start ” when I was in college, and didn’t really know if startups were going to be my whole career, or if I was going to ever start one. As I look towards going further and further down that path, I revisited the book and took notes on what I found to be the greatest insights. There’s no real order here, this is a reference mainly for me that I’m…
I’ve never met a manager who loves “ perf review season”, and the way most companies run their perfomance reviews it’s pretty easy to understand why. As a company scales, there seems to be an irresistible urge to make performance reviews more and more complicated. I’ve seen processes where the HR team will spend three months defining values, then another month defining the process for reviewing an…
It is very hard for the average resident of a U.S. city to know what’s going on with their civic government. It’s even harder for them to get any sort of historical context on why things are the way they are. Let’s take my hometown, the City of Alameda. Six months ago if you wanted to know which city meetings had discussed rent control, your options were: Have a friend who is a constant watcher of…
The Athleticism So, it turns out golf is a sport. By which I mean, its a real sport, a competitive physical activity that taxes the body and mind. I’m writing this on a Wednesday, three days after my first golf outing as an adult, and my back and forearms are still feeling the effort it took to complete a 9-hole round. I may not like it, but I am not what peak performance looks like, and yet I am…
I have the courage of my convictions, but not the courage of my perceptions. By “ courage of my convictions”, I mean that my default is “ strong opinions, loosely held” — I will defend my position, but try to be very open to being proven wrong. Occasionally, I will put a real stake in the ground on something I believe in, because it is fundamental to who I am or because I have done the research or…
Note: The State of California calls it’s ballot initiatives “ Propositions”. Alameda County lists them as “ Measures”. I’m speaking to Alameda County here, so they’re listed as Measures. Summary President: Biden/Harris 13th Congressional: Barbara Lee 9th State Senate: Nancy Skinner 18th Assembly: Rob Bonta Judicial: Elena Condes Peralta Trustee, Area 1: No Endorsement AUSD School Board: Heather…
This post owes its inspiration, as so many posts do, to a tweet from patio11 . I have tremendous respect for Patrick, and enjoy every conversation I have with him, but in one particular case I think he’s wrong, and he’s wrong in a subtle way that took me a long time to understand, because it goes against our idea of what an elected official in the US does, especially at the local level. I’m going…
In 2017, I attended one of the first Arena Summits in Raleigh, NC . Arena is an organization that formed after the 2016 election to try to solve a problem: The Democrats in 2016 had no “ bench”. Bench is a sports term, here, and if you spend any time in politics you’ll know that the American political community adores sports metaphors. When we say that in 2016 the Democrats had no bench, what we…
Growing up, I was incredibly lucky to have regular access to two staggeringly beautiful places. One was the Santa Cruz mountains, and specifically the camp in Felton where my family often volunteered and vacationed. The other was the property my great-grandparents owned in the Calabasas highlands. From one angle, these places are shockingly different. The forests of Santa Cruz are lush and verdant…
Many of us have more free time than we expected right now. As a result, I’ve gotten a number of requests for my management reading list, since I’m known to read a lot of books on management — I will effectively buy any management book someone recommends to see if there’s any value to glean from it. What follows is a list of all the management books I’ve read, broken into some rough sections. I…
Every engineer I’ve met falls somewhere on this spectrum: One side is Maker, the people who like engineering because they like building things. They often get joy and satisfaction from seeing a thing they built out in the world and used by people. Makers tend to flock to product-focused companies. One side is Puzzler. A Puzzler gets their joy and satisfaction from overcoming difficult problems.…
I’ve been thinking about minimalism wrong for a few years now, and it took my first trip to Japan for me to realize it. If you had asked me before my trip, before November of 2019, I would have said that simplicity was the point of minimalism. This sounds like a tautology, because my logic was flawed — I thought simplicity for the sake of simplicity was part of minimalism’s ultimate goal. There…
This blog post was supposed to come out two years ago in response to, I think, this article . Better late than never? After literally years of people telling me I should read Matt Levine’s Money Stuff , I finally started reading Matt Levine’s Money Stuff. One takeaway from this is that I am susceptible to social pressure if I respect the people applying the pressure highly enough. The more…
I think there’s a secret to the most recent run of Mickey Mouse . The most recent Mickey Mouse television series , which ended a multi-decade era where new Mickey content was absent from American television, began airing in 2013. Each season is a set of one-off shorts starring Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, and Donald, with occasional cameos from Pluto, Pete, Daisy, Chip, and Dale. If these names are…
As I mentioned in my last post , I recently moved from being a Senior Software Engineer to a Team Lead. I’m fortunate to have received the advice early in my career that moving to management is less a promotion and more starting a new job; I immediately started looking for information on how to get better at this new job, fast. I am doubly fortunate to know Jacob Kaplan-Moss, and to have come…
In November, I was promoted from Senior Software Engineer to Team Lead. As of right now, I lead the Platform team at Patreon, and have three software engineers who report to me. I want to talk about how I realized this was something I wanted, how I made this happen for me, and why I’m excited about it. First, how did I think this was something I wanted? It’s helpful to know that I am mercilessly…
As I started writing this post, I got blocked by the dang title. I couldn’t think up one, and so I started writing in the hope that one would come to me. It’e been a long time since anything was published to this blog. It’s not that I haven’t been writing; if anything my volume of prose has gone up dramatically in the past year as I’ve started pushing for more and more documentation on the teams I…
Mastodon is currently my favorite social network. I love it so much, I started my own server with some friends, and I’m proud to say it’s still going strong. You can read about The Wandering Shop in my previous post about why I started it . Part of the reason I love Mastodon and The Wandering Shop is that it’s a social community where we get to define the rules, and we get to control who is and…
“ If you’re a programmer you should attend technical conferences to further your career.” Some variation of this was said to me so often when I was starting out as a writer of software that it became something like gospel. It became how I approached conferences; I was there to gain skills or a network that would help me further my career in some way, or further the interests of whoever my employer…
There are many challenges to running an Open Source organization, but the one that I have personally felt the pain of again and again is that our tooling is awful. Github (and realistically we’re all using Github at this point) still feels in many ways like a tool designed around the idea that all the action is going to happen in one repo. This may not be entirely the fault of Github. Git itself…
Python is the best technical community I’ve seen, and close to the best community I’ve seen at this scale. If you’ve been programming for any length of time, you’ve seen technologies and frameworks and languages rise and fall. We often bemoan the loss of certain ideas from these fallen works, but rarely talk about the communities that fell with them. Python is in many ways the most deliberate…
Hey #Python friends! Inspired by #PyCon2017 I’m running for @ThePSF board of directors. https://t.co/9n85CcqfgI — Philip at PyCon (@phildini) May 25, 2017 I’m entering the arena for the third year. I’m running to be a Director for the Python Software Foundation. This post will help explain why. There’s an argument that anything I write here should instead be in my candidate statement . I don’t…
There is a recurring villain in the Terry Pratchett novels called The Auditors. They show up over a number of books as the adversary of Death, and make one of their most daring ploys in Thief of Time , which I also consider in the top five of the Discworld canon. The Audtiors, who I describe in the singular because it thinks of itself as one entity, is one of the most insidious adversaries in the…
I think people have an impression that I make lots of contributions to Open Source (only recently true), and that therefore I am a master of navigating the steps contributing to Open Source requires (not at all true). Contributing to Open Source can be hard. Yes, even if you’ve done it for a while. Yes, even if you have people willing to help and support you. If someone tries to tell you that…
During the PyCon 2016 Sprints, I was made a Core Contributor to the BeeWare project, and was given the ‘ commit bit’ on Batavia , an implementation of the Python virtual machine written in Javascript. A friend of mine who works with the PDX PyLadies and regularly encourages people to contribute to Open Source saw this, and asked that I write a blog post on becoming a Core Contributor to Open…
The Python Software Foundation ( PSF ) is the non-profit that owns python.org, helps run PyPI, and makes sure PyCon happens. This is the introduction to a series of posts that will discuss some challenges that face the PSF and community as a whole, as well as some suggested solutions. The big idea underlying all the little ideas in the following posts is this: The Python community is a unique and…