Brandon Willett software developer guy! I like bicycles!
I’m not shy about how I like to work in the “infrastructure” section of a tech company – it’s my favorite area, and I tell people as much all the time! However, in online software circles and around the office, I don’t often hear people as excited about infrastructure as I am. Part of this might just be why I like it so much – when I talk about it, I realize my narrative is pretty different from…
I’m not writing this in defense of LLMs. At this point it seems to me that their impact on the world is going to be like the Internet’s – a lot of really good stuff, and a lot of really bad stuff, all wrapped up into one impossible human development. On one hand it’s hard to look at the toll this development has already taken – on artists whose work was first stolen and is now devalued, on older…
Last week, I tried to “vibe code” something for the first time. I’ve been using LLMs (usually Claude Code ) to help with work for a little while now, but in a very limited (and closely monitored) capacity – asking it to give me the idiomatic version of some bad Typescript I’ve written, or having it write unit test scaffolding, requests like this. I never accepted anything it wrote without reading…
Metrics are usually lying to you. There isn’t anything nefarious going on; the metrics (…hopefully) aren’t just wrong, and your coworkers (…hopefully) aren’t secretly working for your competitor to undermine your team’s operational excellence. A metric is just a perspective – an impossibly thin, one-dimensional slice of a system, and it’s up to us meatbags to try to infer its meaning. Too often,…
I’ve had the good fortune to work with some really incredible engineers in my career. I mean the sort of people who spawned the “10x developer” myth – the ones who can write entire low-level databases from scratch which outperform (and, uh, out-reliable?) anything we could have gotten off the shelf; the ones who will go out and implement a solution in two weeks for a problem everyone else thought…
My wife Hannah and I got a car a few months ago! Specifically, it is a used 2021 Honda HR-V, which (for us) strikes a great balance of being small on the outside and big on the inside. Most importantly, it’s very very blue: Anyways! Before settling on the HR-V, we researched a bunch of different cars to determine what would work best for us. During this time, I came across Cars101.com , a…
About two years ago, Valve debuted the “ Steam Deck ”, a handheld computer that looked like a Nintendo Switch but was capable of running PC games. Then, 6 months ago, the company followed this up with an updated model called the “Steam Deck OLED”. I’m a fan! Aside from the new screen (from which it got its name), one of the main stated improvements of this new model was its substantially improved…
Docker confused me for a while. Containers are like VMs… but better, somehow? They’re “lightweight”, but I need to install some multi-gigabyte program and learn a special new file format in order to use them on my Mac? I’m developing software just fine right now, why would I want to add all this this complexity to my toolchain? Since then, I’ve had the chance to work on containerized services in…
Last month, I quit my job at Datadog after working there for a little over 3 years. I learned a lot while I was there – a lot of how you should do things, and of course a bit about how you probably should not do things – and I wanted to take a minute to write some of it down, while it’s all still fresh in my mind. Disclaimer This is all purely my own opinion , and only reflects my own experiences…