Field notes
I write about engineering, leadership and building things on Substack. This is the archive of earlier notes, from before I moved there.
Earlier notes
> War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its s…
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The hamburger is a miracle of human invention – a glistening, grease-laden monument to appetite and hubris. It is, at once, the most democratic of foods and the…
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> TL;DR — I built a live‑scoring party app while half‑watching the semi‑finals, sipping Aperol, and “vibe‑coding” between key changes. Now it’s on the App Store…
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There was a time when saying _“I’m building a serious app in React Native”_ was an admission of either masochism or a deadline. A decade ago, it was the tech eq…
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> “I have measured out my life in monitor inches.” > – _Me remembering the time I read T. S. Eliot_ ---------- ## Act I — _The Scrappy Years_ Picture 2011…
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Imagine, if you will, a lone developer lit only by the blue‑white glow of three ultra-wide monitors, fingers clacking at a tempo that would alarm even the most …
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There was a time — brief, golden, and probably only remembered by people who still manually clear their cookies — when browser notifications felt like magic. Yo…
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There’s a kind of loneliness that comes from watching something almost work. It’s not like regular failure. It’s the feeling you get when you _see_ the finish l…
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"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things," said Phil Karlton, in a quote so frequently cited that finding its …
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Netflix drops a provocative new series about a teenage boy spiralling into online-fuelled violence, and surprise the confected outrage machine goes into overdr…
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I spent last week in a bizarre experiment: **vibe coding** with my AI sidekick called Cursor. Think of it like pairing up with some hyper-energetic buddy who c…
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I recently decided to try what the internet has termed **vibe coding** with an AI pair-programmer known as **Cursor**—a tool that supposedly integrates with yo…
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Please indulge me as I share a dark secret; in the sphere of engineering interviews, I have committed the cardinal sin of “trusting my gut.” Many times. Gasp, r…
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Permit me to start with a small confession: sometimes, I am the laziest person on Earth. “Lazy” in the sense that I will spend half a Saturday morning lying on …
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I’d like to introduce you to a brand-new agile methodology that I’ve dubbed **“the Rake Method,”** inspired by that most serene and deceptively simple tool from…
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Let’s begin with an admission: I once believed in microservices the way children believe in the Tooth Fairy—earnestly, uncritically, and with a giddy anticipati…
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California man discovers this one weird trick for building modern full-stack applications in TypeScript without losing your sanity. There’s a neat little tool …
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I have a confession that I’m not sure precisely how to begin, a biggish confession about something considered an accepted best practice in software development.…
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I should come right out and admit that, in my earlier coding days, I was a wide-eyed connoisseur of front-end JavaScript frameworks—React, Angular, Vue, Svelte,…
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I want to share an unabashedly positive confession: I love “boring” technology. Love it the way small children love the overly familiar bedtime story they can …
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Allow me to propose a radical notion: **code reviews** can be a source of genuine camaraderie and delight. Yes, you read that right—these seemingly pedestrian e…
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There is, I have discovered, a rather exotic pleasure in simultaneously grappling with an architecture that demands near-total infallibility^1^ while also raci…
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I’d like to propose a radical notion for the land of code sprints, product roadmaps, and constant Slack notifications: **empathy** might be the most important t…
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It’s a near-universal phenomenon: the sequel. In theory, it should be a joyous reunion, a chance to rediscover characters and worlds we love. But for me, the wo…
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I have a confession—one that I’ve been harboring ever since I wrote my first “Hello, world” in **Go**. Namely, that I love this language. *Love* as in, can’t-he…
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Allow me to start with a personal confession: I used to hoard tasks like they were rare collectibles, each to-do item carefully guarded in my own private vault …
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So let’s talk productivity hacks, shall we? In a tech industry crammed full of bustling Slack channels, perpetually ticking JIRA boards, and endless email threa…
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I’d like to propose a small riddle: Why, in an age of “digital transformation” and near-limitless tech budgets, do we still see so many hopelessly buggy, slow, …
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Sometimes, in the swirling vortex of coding interviews and hush-hush gossip about “famous tech companies renowned for their engineering,” you might hear a mythi…
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Let’s begin with a small thought experiment: imagine you’re as visionary as Steve Jobs and as intellectually unstoppable as Grace Hopper, yet you haven’t quite …
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