Posts

In my free time, I play around with writing fiction. It’s a lot like gardening - I collect interesting ideas, come up with unique worlds, and plots. Thus far, it’s mostly been a vehicle for fuelling my imagination rather than anything that produces a finished draft. It’s been on my list to actually sit down and write out a short story with some of my world building.

At my usual Saturday rock climbing/brain trust meeting, the topic of software complexity came up. It occurred to me that the square/cube scaling law applies equally well to software engineering as it does to living things.

I was recently asked an interesting question regarding AI and software development - is it better to specialise, or become a better generalist? The short answer is neither – the frame around the question is too specific to be useful as a guide.

I've noticed that my decision making could do with a tune up. It takes both mindset and process to drive the best circumstance to overcome the problems in front of us. The right mindset is one of optimism - we rarely see the entire picture, and thus do not have enough information to be pessimistic.

It is a good reminder that perfectionism is a character flaw. Something done imperfectly is better than never starting at all. We must not refrain from action due to the fear of failure. Failure is not getting started in the first place, not doing something imperfectly.

I recently had what I'm terming a "zombie subscription" experience. I had forgotten to cancel a service for a to-do app. The service renewed and charged my card without notice before or after the transaction.

I've been doing some deliberate engagement with my learning process lately. One of my goals for 2025 is to build several personal projects with Ruby on Rails. My ultimate goal for Rails is to either get a job working with it or build something that brings in enough to live on.

Recently, I've been making an attempt to drive calmer. The process I landed on combines the gamification, the loss aversion cognitive bias, and an awareness practice to help me be chill while driving.

Email is one of the internet's foundational user interfaces. Almost everyone on the internet who might use a service can be assumed to have one. As an interface for user interaction however, email is often overlooked.

Many developers assume incorrectly that the best solution to a user's problem is another app. This fails to account for the second and third order costs that users pay for an app. The true cost also includes the price paid in our finite daily attention, willpower, and time.

This post has come about from several weeks of reflection on tech debt. Code quality, typically considered to be a measure of how well a project has managed complexity, is also a reflection of the decision making skills of the developers writing the code.

The mainstream media isn't lying. They're just telling you the truth from the viewpoint that best suits those in power. The distinction is important - objective, absolute, and durable truth is extremely rare, especially in the political arena.