Adam Keys is typing

Mitchell Hashimoto, Contributing to Complex Projects: The first step to understanding the internals of any project is to become a user of the project. You do not have to become an expert user, but my personal graduation criteria for this step is to try to build something real using the project, even if it is […]

Perspective is the lens we view our world, work, relationships, etc. All the luck, resources, or knowledge in the world are wasted without good perspective. If we’re talking about life like it’s a role playing game character sheet, you want to have a good perspective stat/multiplier. Some clever tricks: keep the mind open and flexible […]

The agency to create the system or process you want to work in (axiomatically?) implies you’ll rarely get to work in the system because you’re spending a lot of time working on the system by communicating/iterating/supporting it. 🤷🏻‍♂️

It’s tricky to write about leading software teams. Herein, reflections, not complaints, on pursuing higher software leadership truths. Many of which are riffs on 4 Reasons Writing About Software is Hard: Writing is actually an incredibly relevant skill for engineering leadership (and engineering in general), but it’s still hard. You can have all the insights […]

When in doubt, measure. Twice! For ad-hoc/napkin estimates, I use Benchmark.ms { …the code… } to size up the performance of Ruby code. When I want to do The Science to compare approaches, I use benchmark-ips. It works a lot like Benchmark, but does all the cold start, iteration, and math for you. It’s great, […]

The Economist, The Beatles and the art of teamwork: Take the role of Ringo, for example. When he is not actually playing, the band’s drummer spends most of his time either asleep or looking bewildered. When the other three musicians bicker, Ringo smiles beatifically. To a casual observer, he might appear dispensable. But musically, nothing […]

Read your current/new language’s standard library. Highly recommended for developers of all experience levels. You’ll pick up the idioms, you’ll discover something useful. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wonder if they’re making a sequel! My favorites are prelude.hs (which, sadly, does not seem to be the file that Haskell bootstraps itself from any more 🤔) […]