1/6/2025

  • Hitting OKRs vs Doing Your Job – Jessitron

    In Engineering, quarterly OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) can feel like a duplication of product planning. Basically, they say “Ship the Roadmap.” What new information are they comm…

1/5/2025

1/4/2025

12/28/2024

  • Cognitive load is what matters

    There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but let's focus on something more fundamental. What matters is the amount of confusion developers feel when going through the code.

12/6/2024

11/10/2024

10/19/2024

9/26/2024

9/25/2024

  • Thoughts on Debugging

    I was recently asked to help resolve an escalation at work. It had already bounced around between a few people, and was very muddied with conflicting reports not to mention frustration that the issue existed in the first place. Apparently I am insane, because I like situations like this.

9/24/2024

7/4/2024

7/1/2024

  • The Learning System - by Henrik Karlsson

    Controlling a complex system is rarely as effective as allowing it to self-organize: markets work better than planning committees; diverse ecosystems are more robust than monocultures. What would it mean to apply this idea to education?

4/4/2024

3/13/2024

3/10/2024

1/18/2024

  • Life lessons from a 44 year old.

    Don’t exercise to be thin. Exercise to be strong. The best place for ideas is alone and on the move. Start or end every day with writing about your life. Take what’s in your head and type it out, even if you don’t feel like you are thinking anything of note. There’s always something buried underneath the to do list in your head, something you didn’t realise you felt, that when written down, will make everything clearer.

    career

1/2/2024

12/29/2023

  • Dunning–Kruger Effect - The Decision Lab

    Dunning–Kruger Effect explains why the least competent at a task often incorrectly rate themselves as high-performers because they do not know otherwise.

    career
  • The Worst Kind of Programmer | Alexander Mikhailian

    After 25 years of my career I came to understand that one particular type of programmers is the source of many problems in our industry. Here is the story of a project that was nearly destroyed by two such programmers. One of them was leading frontend development, the other – backend. While the rest of the team was slacking off because business requirements were in the works, these two chaps were working hard.

    career

12/19/2023

12/7/2023

11/22/2023

11/16/2023

11/12/2023

11/6/2023

10/17/2023

9/21/2023

  • How-to Evaluate a Product Roadmap, for Engineers

    Aka, how do I know if a product leader knows what they're doing? There are thousands of articles, courses, and guides on how to build a roadmap for product managers. Even with all these resources, roadmaps often become a point of contention between product managers and their stakeholders. There are very few guides for engineers, designers, or executives on how they should evaluate or engage with a product manager's roadmap. This post comes from a presentation I put together to answer a simple b

8/14/2023

  • Semantic Code Reviews

    A lot of information can be found online about suggested best practices for pull requests (PRs) and code reviews, particularly regarding the ideal size, scope, and description of PRs, as well as the desired response time and comment style for code review comments.

    code review

7/18/2023

6/3/2023

5/7/2023

12/28/2022

11/12/2022

  • The BASB Book

    The step-by-step guide to building a Second Brain. Based on 10+ years of research & experiments with organizing our digital lives & improving our productivity.

    focus