Adam Keys is typing

I rented a 12-year old Porsche Boxster via Turo this weekend. Good app, great car. I’m shopping older German convertibles for my next car. Paying a little to rent a prospective car for a day is way better than driving one for less than an hour. Plus, no sales tactics! The center of the Boxster […]

Features in software are answers to questions. How can customers send what they’re looking at to someone else? That’s share via email. How can customers distill all the data about my project’s tasks down to raw data to analyze it? That’s a report, probably with a CSV export. All of these answers exist on some […]

In the sense that trees of people (managers and reports, ala Taylorism) are the old guard. Data (folders and files) are old sauce and nodes + edges are new sauce. In the sense that part of the confusion of our modern world is that e.g. the Koch brothers have considerable influence on how the Republican […]

A lot of us are out here, amongst all the strangeness of the world, trying to figure out how to help our teams adjust to collaborating remotely. It’s long been my observation that nothing beats people in a room together communicating via ad-hoc scribbles on a whiteboard. Seems like a good time to survey the […]

Remember secretaries and drinking at work? And land-line telephones? And smoking inside? Blech! And an even more unequal society with even more thumbs on the scales? My wife and I, when we first watched Mad Men: Oy, Makefiles! And weird preprocessor tricks! And file-scoped variables/memory ownership? And everything is an int, sometimes pretending to be […]

Rules won’t solve your problems, but thinking about them might. To paraphrase a couple well-known quotes: “Rules are useless, but thinking about rules is indispensable” Dwight Eisenhower “No rules survive first contact with a toddler” Helmuth von Moltke the Elder 😉 It’s folly to think we can generate the exact outcomes we want with rules. […]

This year, I’m trying to better keep in touch with friends, family, and former co-workers. It came to my attention that this is, in many ways, a thing for which you would use a customer-relationship management application. This could work, but seems like a lot to me. Most software starts life as a) a document/spreadsheet […]

(…continuing a Twitter thread) io-ts caught my attention a while back and I finally had the chance to read through it. I’m glad folks are experimenting in this area, particularly with the potential reach into multiple communities and ecosystems that TypeScript affords. We use dry-rb extensively at work and I was curious how a TypeScript […]

Prince’s unfinished memoir, The Beautiful Ones is a quick, but awkward, read. The preface is the most coherent, the story of how the editor, Dan Piepenbring, ended up being chosen by Prince to realize his autobiography. It shines an interesting light onto what it was like to be in Prince’s orbit, if only briefly. Of […]

I just finished reading the Watchmen graphic novel and it is amazing. I was drawn in by the HBO series last year, which amplified my enjoyment of the original story. It might end up in my top five works of fiction. The story is of its time: the Cold War, superheroes as saviors. Even better, […]