Thoughts on AI, fullstack development, and engineering culture.
This is a post documenting my day-to-day workflows with jj ( Jujutsu vcs ). Think of this as an onboarding guide to get up-to-speed fast with jj . This won't be a comprehensive tutorial, rather it's an overview of the shortcuts and workflows I use that might be lesser known. What is jj ? jj is a version control system that's compatible with git. It has a lot of useful features, like fast, seamless…
I've just finished a month away from social media. It was a refreshing break, and due to a few intentional habits I've been building up over the year, it was much easier than I expected: it didn't feel like a grand challenge at all. I wanted to intentionally reclaim some of my (often scattered) attention, while still keeping up with my friends and colleagues and with the tech world at large. Now…
Special thanks to Liz, Kent, and Ian at honeycomb for the discussion that inspired this article. There's a strange thing happening in AI right now. You might've heard some claims that we're in an AI bubble, the economy might be doomed, or from the other side that AI is about to revolutionize the world and AGI is right around the corner. In trying to make sense of the situation, I've come to…
OpenAI announced Sora 2 today, their state of the art video generation model. It begins with the text: Everything you are about to see and hear was generated by Sora 2 . Check out the announcement video: Here's a recent trailer from Anthropic, maker of the Claude family of language models (and Anthropic's biggest competitor). The tagline of this video? Keep thinking . What is it that we,…
I've been thinking a lot lately about how to do effective work with Linear. I've survived two companies doing a migration from Asana to Linear, and both times required adapting and learning new patterns and ways of working. Linear is a great tool when it's used well. From experience, though, it's easy to "hold it wrong" and not get many of the benefits Linear can provide for your team. Here's how…
I wrote recently about my experience learning the Go programming language on the job. Here's something I didn't include in the article: I asked one of my coworkers who's an expert in Go what I should do to start learning the language. He said approximately: "I actually don't have anything to tell you. I've been using Go for so long, I don't know what the good place to start as a beginner is"! It's…
This blog now has commenting powered by bluesky! I like bluesky a lot as an app. I think their decentralized model is cool: I have the handle @talor.computer not because I happened to get that username on their site first but because I own the domain name https://talor.computer . All data on the site is freely accessible and easy to retrieve by simple APIs. Very different than X/Twitter's…
I recently started a new position where most of my work is in Go . I've spent almost my entire professional career writing Typescript code, and needed to get up to speed quick at my new job. With a few resources, I was able to jump in and start making contributions to our codebase almost immediately. Go is designed for simplicity, and it shows. Skimming Go code often feels like reading pseudocode…
Most technical interviews ask the wrong question. Companies think they're asking: "Can this person do good work here?" But what they're really asking is: "Can this person perform under artificial pressure while being watched by a stranger?" These are not the same thing. The Real Test A Microsoft study ( Behroozi et al., 2020 ) found that candidates were half as likely to solve an interview…
This blog is built with React and runs on Cloudflare workers. I built it myself, and learned some interesting things along the way. I had an old personal site, with a landing page and a small blog. It was a static generated site built with Jekyll. I never really kept up with the blog, and as time went on I grew more embarrassed of my years-old posts with no followup. If I wanted to make a blog…