My (likely incomplete) programming journey:
1998 - html/css in after school program
2000 - learned to write batch files for windows 98
2002 - visual basic 6 freshmen high school class
2003 - ti-86 basic programs for games and math class formulas
2004 - visual basic .net classes for programming competitions
2007 - c and c++ college intro classes
2008 - PHP and SQL flavors (oracle, MySQL) for class
2010 - more .net + c# classes
2011 - deep php and postgres for work
2012 - html/css/JavaScript change in focus for work projects (backbone.js)
2013 - node.js for work and hobby projects (frontend build tools + react)
2014 - picked up python
2016 - node.js deep dive for backend (serverless, nosql)

Pretty much stayed the course with my language skill set. Honing system design chops along the way.

2025 - elixir is my new jam

I used to think code review was about protecting engineers from themselves. It was always my goal to help keep them from making the same mistakes I made coming up.

But you can't, and it's exhausting. Give them the tools, give them resources, and automate as much as you can. Listen when they have questions, and give thoughtful answers and direction.

That's all you can do, and they'll learn through making mistakes the same way you did. The value is actually being a mentor for when hard problems come and they don't have the experience they need yet.

Hearing DHH call vibe coding "empty calories" is

👏 on 👏 fucking 👏 point 👏

15+ years in the "industry" and I'm slowly losing my ability to be self motivated. I'm tired of the grind most days.

But any time someone comes to me with a problem they're stuck on, I'm instantly motivated.

Am I burnt out or just transitioning?

Have tried zed's IDE on and off since it was launched, and they finally dropped that last missing piece for me: `git` integration ♥️

https://zed.dev/blog/git

As a product manager, acting like engineering is the only lever to speed up the delivery date on a project when we had the kick off meeting *last week* is slightly insulting.

Your job is to pull all the levers at your disposal to deliver your feature. Instead, you take up half the quarter figuring out what you want. Them give design and stakeholders an entire month to debate the UX before handing it off to be built.

It's simple math, and each part of the process delays the other.

But don't worry, eng will cut all the corners to get it there 🫠👍

Sometimes you need to spend the first 4 days of the week _feeling_ useless, to realize bright and early on Friday you actually were dumb this whole time.

Cheers 🥂

I know local dev is hard in a complex system, but if tooling prevents you from working for an entire day something is seriously wrong.

JavaScript: Default exports vs. named exports

Who gives a fuck, honestly? I used to think there was merit to one over the other, but I'm running out of steam to have these silly debates.

It's obvious that a lot of product managers need to take basic stats classes. Your metrics are pointless and lack direction. 🖕

What do you hate most about your current CI/CD setup at work?

Mine is that staging and production are released independently. If staging fails, it can still roll out to master. This scares me.

Splitting acceptance tests into categories of "blocking" and "non-blocking" just to allow CI to pass, is a waste of time and effort.

Check out the Changeling podcast series. Solid content about all aspects of working as an engineer.

Whiteboard the concept, tell a friend who hypes me up, never speak of it again.

Sorry Facebook recruiters, I don't think I can work for a company that has all the information that would likely prevent me from getting a job in the first place.

Start up leadership advice:

Believe your employees when they say they feel a certain way, or saw there's a problem. Fight the urge to defend what you're currently doing that may address it, and just hear them out.

Decided to start a new project tonight. A `brew upgrade && brew update` here, a software --install --restart` there. An hour from now I'll be ready for bed and have yet to punch a line of code.

Always best to start tomorrow anyway.

Am I the only one that negatively judges people who listen to podcasts or audio books while they write code?

"On a long enough timeline the survival rate for software drops to zero."

If we could get a full-time dev ops person for our org, I'd be so happy...

Do not, I repeat... DO NOT approve a pull request that you cannot adequately review. You're more to blame than the person who wrote the code in the first place when it fails.

The biggest distraction in all issue trackers is the hemorrhaging backlog of tickets that will _never_ be done, or aren't important yet.

This is why I just choose not to even bother opening it and let my PM close them out. :-)

How long are we going to let hardware advancements bail us out from writing shitty software?

As a front-end developer who has a firm grasp on web tooling, I still think the sheer amount of knowledge needed for dev-ops/deploy tools is staggering.

When a code sample is so obfuscated that it's almost better to leave it alone that to properly refactor it.

NoSQL database solutions are only useful for event streams. Nothing else. Wrestling with DynamoDB to try and filter a complex query is unnecessarily complex .

Suffering from our first service outage since I've been at my new job.

Guess when it happened? While we have TOO MANY projects going on.

When you have too many pots on the stove, you're bound to forget the smallest, most crucial detail.

I can't count how many times I've hated other people for writing MY blog posts.

If you come up with something you think is clever, write a short post about it, and don't hate yourself for not getting feedback.

A few weeks ago I finally got buy in to migrate our web team to GitLab for CI/CD.

All week GitLab has been having issues, pretty much rendering us unable to deploy anything with confidence.

Can't wait for _this_ to come up. haha

As silly as it sounds, but migrating our company's web application from Ember/JSON API --> React/GraphQL would be a pretty solid achievement.

We're almost to read-only feature parity at the moment with a single developers side time as a proof of concept.