Work Stuff

Just the nerd posts, if you want to skip all the personal life things:

January 17, 2026:
Predictions about AI (I’m really bad at predictions)
I’ve been tidying up around here lately — as one does every few years when one maintains a long-lived, little-trafficked blog mostly out of a guilty s…
January 14, 2026:
What does it mean to be an engineering leader?
As an engineering leader, you have an important role to play in the growth of people, products, and the organization. Your job is not to manage people…
November 29, 2023:
Adventures in Obsolete Software
Gonna keep the names in this one a tiny bit vague because I'm not sure I should be talking about it in public. (How's that for a hook? Are you interes…
July 16, 2023:
Terrifying Tales of Codebase Complexity
This was an interview with the nice folks at digma.ai, as part of their Coding Horrors series.) (You may have noticed I've been doing a lot of these i…
January 31, 2023:
Things I didn’t know about management, before I went into management
aka What Do They Do All Day? I was talking about software development with some software developers, as one does. And one of those software developers…
January 30, 2023:
...taps microphone
...well, okay, I predicted 2026, so I'm about three years early. Code gets dusty awfully quickly! What keeps happening is, I get distracted and forget…
January 22, 2023:
Developer Observability
This is another one destined for the Sprkl Dev Blog. Here you get to see it in its prepublication state, because you came straight to the source. (Tha…
November 27, 2022:
An Interview With Sprkl
Note: This interview was reworked into 37 Tips For Improving Productivity In Software Development Teams on the Sprkl developer blog. I'm posting the o…
August 10, 2022:
SaaSy
Drawback of having the words "senior" and "manager" in my job title: I could easily spend my entire workday, every day, in cold calls and "quick 15-mi…
August 1, 2022:
I got fired
If you're not attuned to what high-level corporate feedback sounds like, you can go a surprisingly long time believing it to be praise. (Not me in thi…

The rest of this is probably already obsolete

January 25, 2021:
December 18, 2017:
September 7, 2017:
April 27, 2017:
January 21, 2016:
July 3, 2015:
May 27, 2015:
May 6, 2015:
January 23, 2015:
May 19, 2014:
February 20, 2014:
April 25, 2013:
February 28, 2013:
February 23, 2012:
April 9, 2011:
March 28, 2011:
December 12, 2010:
October 12, 2010:
October 8, 2010:
June 15, 2010:
June 8, 2010:
July 25, 2009:
February 12, 2008:
January 7, 2008:
December 12, 2007:
November 26, 2007:
January 10, 2007:
January 2, 2007:
November 13, 2006:
June 14, 2006:
August 17, 2005:
August 4, 2005:
June 30, 2005:
March 12, 2005:
February 26, 2005:
February 16, 2005:
January 24, 2005:
January 18, 2005:
December 13, 2004: