Adam Keys is Thinking

Fall is setting into the Pacific Northwest, and I’m (mostly) fine with that. Grey, rain, not particularly warm. “Stay-inside” weather. I prefer summer, but the changing seasons are nice. This, and adjacency to multiple biomes, is why we moved to Oregon!

On our last visit to California (outside the Disneyland bubble), I noticed more of the in-between places. Oregon’s in-betweens, at least along the western part of the state, are way more interesting than California’s between San Jose and Monterey. Grasslands remain not-my-thing.

🕹️ I’m trying to play fewer open-ended video games. I should select games that are designed for some idea of finishing and reaching a satisfying ending. But, Marathon and its (open-ended) skill-climb is often compelling. Possibly, I will never not play an activer Bungie game. Which works out, since it seems like their future is on the fence.

I need more close-ended, finish it, and you’re done games. Or, to replace gaming with something more fruitful and becoming of a grown man. I could be pretty good at a lot of things if I’d spend the dozens and hundreds of gaming hours at other hobbies. 🤷‍♂️

Finished: Plato’s The Republic by Plato 📚. Plato sure doesn’t like creative-types! Talk about zero self-awareness. Though, I suppose “philosopher” wasn’t considered the same school as sculptors and poets back in the day.

I’m on book six of Dune. But, I’m just now finding out the story runs eight books. (Have Frank/Brian Herbert not heard of trilogies?)

Finding focus when working with coding agents, flying too close to the multitasking sun. But, it turns out concise output and taking intentional time away from tokens is the key.

Driving more confident in autocross, trying to use the pedals, both brake and gas, more. But, I’m still slow.

It’s all dumb. But, we learn things.

🛬Back from Spain. Vermouth de grifo, Hieronymus Bosch and Matisse, old buildings, and public green spaces are pretty great.

📚Still at it with Power Broker and the first six Dune novels. Larry McMurtry essays are making me a little nostalgic for the idea of Texas (but not contemporary Texas itself). Contemplating adding the giant book of all the Montaigne essays to this list.😎

🎥 Hoppers was fun and feels like possibly a return to form for Pixar. Mandolorian and Grogu isn’t the best or worst Star Wars, but it is fun and hits all the expectations.

📺 Rooster is great if you’ve ever fancied becoming a sharp-witted author and visiting professor in New England. Widow’s Bay is great if ever you’ve wondered what being the mayor of an obscure but definitely cursed island in the northeast might look like.

⭐I should call out Hacks here. That is how you end a series, a comedy in particular. I will now enthusiastically recommend this show to everyone as The Ideal Comedy television series. If you haven’t, go watch it. Five seasons, no skips or lulls.

Yeah, I’ve locked in to a few writing and coding sessions with The Social Network soundtrack. But, have you ever tried locking in to something you can move your hips to?

Related: currently compiling a list of Soundtracks That Didn’t Have To Go So Hard, and Prince’s Batman is way up there.

Wrapping up lil’ document editor “research”, starting to write more on it. In short: cross-platform in the Apple ecosystem is possible, but tricky once you get into third-party libraries. Agent coding makes a lot possible, but doesn’t make anything trivial. Prototypes without a plan for using it regularly, at least in the process of building the thing, are not going to generate useful insight.

False spring has passed in Portland, real spring is coming up soon. Our yard is starting to bloom. I’m fine with trading off an hour of sleep tomorrow for later sunsets.

📚 Iberia / James Michener, Liberation Day / George Saunders

🎧 Jill Scott, To Whom This May Concern. First album of hers I’ve listened to, it is excellent.

📺 Wonder Man, Ponies. The latter is great but somehow over-complicated the season finale.

🎮 Marathon, somewhat surprising to me. But, I’ve played a lot of Halo and entirely too much Destiny, so this tracks.

💻 Amp and Paper are pretty dang good, Claude Opus 4.6 is as good as they all say. I’ve bounced off Cursor, VS Code and its forks just aren’t for me.

✈️ Visited my parents in Dallas, had literally too much Tex-Mex. Happened to sit at the table next to Randy Travis at dinner one night. We rented a new Ford Bronco, and that is a large car. Perfect for Texas highways, though, if you don’t mind the wind noise.

I’ve been reading Power Broker on and off throughout the year (brag). I’m almost five hundred pages in (brag again) and it’s worth it. The writing is as good as the research is deep. Which is to say, it manages to maintain a great pace even though it’s a huge book (brag the third). Caro’s pacing, by alternating between moving the Robert Moses story ahead and adding color by telling the brief story of the minor characters involved in Moses’ story at the time.

Furthermore, Robert Moses was a real jerk. And, a bully. 🤦‍♂️ Same as it ever was.

I’m continuing with the Dune chronicles. Children of Dune seemed like all setup and only perfunctory pay-off. God Emperor felt like it had more to say, whether it’s philosophical or political. The three thousand year jump ahead is a lot, though!

As a palate cleanser between Dune novels and Power Broker chapters: just started Liberation Day by George Saunders and Iberia by James Michener. 📈

Since I last wrote a /now post:

• Friends visited, a lovely time being a tourist in our hometown was had.
• We went to Disneyland for my birthday, stayed at our favorite hotel, ate our favorite things, it was good.
• Saw The Roots in a downtown town square, this was a great way to check off a rare “live music experience I’d like to have”, expectations were met and exceeded.

I’m building myself a personalized CRM for tracking job applications. A very vanilla Rails stack so far, the only exotic thing I’ve done is try deploying to a local Docker runtime via Kamal. Turns out that’s swimming upstream more than I want, so it’s deployed to a local Docker runtime via a bespoke script that Claude Code helped me write.🤷🏻‍♂️

The McPhee method. I’ve been so thoroughly nerd-sniped by this. A way of turning notes into outlines into essays and articles? The only way this could be more my jam is if there was some connection to Stevie Wonder, Stravinsky, or Porsche. This is taking up a surprising amount of mental space.😆🤓

📚Currently reading:

Ursula LeGuin, The Language of the Night. A series of essays about writing, science fiction, and LeGuin’s own works. The only novel of hers read is The Dispossesed, but I’m enjoying the heck out of her non-fiction writing and thinking. It’s pretty timely, despite being fifty years old in most cases. Bonus points for LeGuin being a longtime Portland, Oregon resident as well. And, now I really want to read essays and short non-fiction from other favorites like Vonnegut, Stephenson, etc.

James Gleick, Genius. Gleick isn’t quite Caro, but his non-fiction writing really pops. And how could it not, with a subject like Feynman?

Frank Herbert, Children of Dune. Messiah was a bit short, and felt like nothing happened, even though it rather upends the story you’re expecting to get. This one feels like a bunch of scheming and setting of the dramatic tables. Not as much world building as the original Dune. Unsure if I’m up for reading all six of these books. I’ve heard it gets even weirder though!

Craig Mod, Things Become Other Things. I’m, obviously, a huge fan of Craig’s writing. There’s less “meta” about the actual walking in this one. More of an interwoven story of Mod’s childhood friend, observations of the people and places he meets whilst walking, and his own life story. It’s a lovely bit of memoir.

I kept an 8-week streak of writing and publishing a newsletter essay going. I love the output, but not that it absorbs almost all of my writing energy. Back to re-thinking the format on that one.

“It ships because it’s 11:30am” was useful in setting that streak. But “focus on the 2 or 3 most important things, let everything else sit sadly in the corner” is also a handy regimen. In this case: 1) job searching, 2) get a newsletter out there consistently.

Courtney and I are heads-down at furnishing and tidying our basement, so folks can visit. I’m going to count that work as a win for “building things”, even though it’s not software or writing.📈

📺 Currently watching:

• MurderBot: I might have cast this differently, but I’m still enjoying it.
• Poker Face: still an absolute delight.
• The Bear: they push me away with all the yelling, they pull me back in with “people doing a creative thing together” montages.

A few reflections on what I’ve been building (with) lately:

• llm is great for prototyping many kinds of workflows. If you’re thinking “I’d like to build an app with some intelligence” and “I don’t mind tinkering with CLI apps”, give it a go. In particular, templates and fragments are very useful for assembling the rudiments of problem solution.
• Part and parcel with using llm, I’m tinkering with locally runnable models via Ollama. On my M3 MacBook Pro with 24 GB of total memory, Qwen3 and Mistral are small enough to fit into GPU memory and run pretty quickly. With “thinking” disabled (the open models will spend many tokens talking to themselves!), they are fast enough for development work and experimentation. They definitely aren’t at the same level as the latest from Anthropic or OpenAI. But, the future is promising for using these smaller models instead of relying on metered API access for every single token of intelligence.
• Putting those two together, I’m hacking out some tools to help with job search. My goal is to reduce the effort to see if a job description matches what I’m looking for, generate ideas for customizing a cover letter to the role, and provide useful answers for any pre-interview questions. Next step: put an actual UI on my llm-based prototype.
• To wit: I’m studying up on Python, FastAPI, HTMX, etc. by asking Claude Code to write learning projects and then asking it questions about why it wrote them that way. Turns out, this helps me with language idioms and library setup pitfalls. Wild times!

Currently reading

• 🐙 Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures: on an octopus and a widow. A recommendation from my sister. I could go with more octopus narration.
• 🕰️ Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: the thesis is that no amount of time management gives you infinite time, so you might as well take advantage of the present.
• 🧐 Arendt / The Human Condition: reading along with Commonplace Philosophy.
• ⏸️ Holiday/Right Thing, Right Now: on morals, through the lens of many historical tales and Stoicism.
• ⏸️ Lichtenberg/The Waste Books: turns out, witty one-liners and reflections on life look about the same in notebooks from the 18th century as they do on modern social media. 😅

Ideas stuck in my head

Is there really a way to push back on the complexity of the web? — Tom MacWright on the plight of modern, full-stack software development.

On loving your fate, how to handle pressure, and the value of being proactive yet positive – James Clear on tackling the challenges of life.

You don’t need Scrum. You just need to do Kanban right. — Lucas F. Costa on how Scrum is a hobbled version of Kanban, if you squint right.

Thinking a bit about essays because Room to think and Essays the size of cathedrals.

It’s been so long since we spoke, /now-page aficionados.

I’ve been moving to Portland, buying a house therein, and selling a house in a bizarre hyperlocal real estate situation. Some of these I have a lot of control over, some I am frustratingly very much in the passenger seat on.

I’m still leading engineering teams holistically, acting true to “we can go further together than we can alone”, and writing about it (more for myself than others than I’d like).

Some days, I’m just trying to ignore the recursive news screwball that is 2024.

Actually, baseball is a fair metaphor here. It’s curveballs all the way down. I’m fouling off most of them, though. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I’ve been thinking a lot about setting expectations and goals. I have an idea about setting expectations on how we practice software development in teams and four pillars thereof. They are, broadly: alignment/consensus, accountability/responsibility, transparency/visibility, execution. These seem like four useful touch-points for coaching individuals. More concretely: help teammates drive scope (down, mostly) by setting time expectations and iterating from there.

The other angle on my mind is using subjective measurements to evaluate changes to human systems. That is, don’t ask a person or team to change how they work and immediately hit a numeric benchmark. Instead, ask them how the change is going and rate it from 1-5, worst to best. If the desired outcome is “know what the team is up to on most days”, ask them to write a status report, but don’t specify a number to hit. Instead, use 1:1s to reflect on how the change is impacting their work, look for advantages or shortcomings to the change in process, and decide how to correct course from there.

Updates: LLMs are still promising, but not as much for leadership work. Working incrementally, still underrated.

Like everyone (it seems), I’m exploring how large language model copilots/assistants might change how I work. A few of the things that have stuck with me:

• Use LLMs to reduce the cost of doing things, there by increasing ambition. That is, reducing cost increases demand.
• Using LLM prompting to think through/design a new bit of program functionality. If one can manage to write a generic prompt, without proprietary information, you have given many programmers a much wiser pair than they might normally have.
• Use LLM flexible tool for thinking through problems or solving them outright. GPT4 is like rolling a REPL, a junior developer, and a conversational partner into one very flexible toolkit.
  

My take right now: GitHub Copilot is the real deal and helpful, today. On the low-end, it’s the most useful autocomplete I’ve used. On the high-end, it’s like having a pair who has memorized countless APIs (with a somewhat fallible memory) but can also type in boilerplate bits of code quickly, so I can edit, verify, and correct them.

I don’t expect the next few products I try to hit that mark. But, I suspect I will have a few LLM-based tools in my weekly rotation by the end of the year.