Adam Keys is typing

Developer and engineering manager at large

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  • March 26, 2020

    Whiteboard, even if you’re a distributed team

    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 […]

  • March 24, 2020

    Wherein the ā€œgood old daysā€ are revisited

    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 […]

  • March 24, 2020

    Use as few rules as possible, mostly guidelines

    Rules won’t solve your problems, but thinking about them might. To paraphrase a couple well-known quotes: ā€œRules are useless, but thinking about rules is indispensableā€ Dwight Eisenhower ā€œNo rules survive first contact with a toddlerā€ Helmuth von Moltke the Elder šŸ˜‰ It’s folly to think we can generate the exact outcomes we want with rules. […]

  • February 22, 2020

    Keep in touch with friends, the littlest CRM that could

    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 […]

  • February 21, 2020

    Enforce system consistency at the boundaries & meditations on run-time type systems

    (…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 […]

  • February 12, 2020

    The Beautiful Ones

    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 […]

  • February 9, 2020

    I watched the various Watchmen

    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, […]

  • February 4, 2020

    Get a cute credit card and overtip

    Highly recommend: get a BB-8 or similarly lovely icon from your favorite mythology on the credit/debit card you most frequently use. I have a couple lovely bonus conversations with folks per week because of it. Sometimes it’s “like your card” but sometimes it’s full “did you see the latest thing?” and it’s nice to talk […]

  • February 2, 2020

    Keep waterfall out of your agile

    An insightful thing my pal Brandon Hays observed is that teams introduce little bits of waterfall into their agile processes when they get burned by scope expansion, bugs, infrastrucure, and such.

  • January 30, 2020

    Unblocking oneself

    Succeeding and thriving at remote work is largely about getting very good at asynchronous (Slack, discussion threads, email, etc.) and nearly-asynchronous (phone calls, video meetings, screen sharing) communication. Productivity in remote work is often bottlenecked by the availability of teammates for near-asynchronous collaboration. Therefore: boost your productivity as a remote team member by writing up […]

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