Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Protect the simplicity of your foundational systems. I’ve been reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications for Book Overflow. I can’t believe I hadn’t read this book sooner. It’s a goldmine of practical wisdom with a deep exploration of tradeoffs. One insight that stood out is that the larger and more reliable a complex system needs to be, the simpler its building blocks must...
13 days ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Our attention is precious. It is a finite resource. When I struggle to make progress on a larger goal, it’s because my attention is spread too thin, my brain is overloaded with context switching costs. The antidote is twofold: reduce what you’re paying attention to, and compress the feedback loop on what remains. Ship something valuable. Learn. Repeat. Wisdom “All art is a work in...
20 days ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight The pressure to ship faster has never been higher. AI tooling, shorter cycles, rising delivery expectations: everything seems to be accelerating. If you aren’t careful, you can easily slip into what Cal Newport calls Pseudo-Productivity, or what I like to call busyness theatre, the illusion of being productive without actually making meaningful progress. Counterintuitively, the...
27 days ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight A healthy culture of learning and experimentation is a cornerstone of high-performing teams. DORA’s research across 39,000+ professionals over the last 10+ years shows us that a climate for learning is a significant predictor of both software delivery performance and organizational performance. Teams with generative cultures show 30% higher organizational performance. Even more...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight It’s easy to dismiss new tools. It’s just as easy to catastrophize them. But I think we miss something when we frame AI tooling either way. When it comes to cutting through the AI hype, two engineers I deeply respect have been on my mind lately. First, Brian Kernighan (Bell Labs, Unix, awk, C), who has been in computing since the 1960s. When we spoke with him on Book Overflow...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight Mental shortcuts can be wonderful. They are so efficient! They help reduce cognitive load while leveraging the hard-won wisdom of people who came before us. But some things can’t be shortcut. If you want to lift more weight, you don’t skip leg day. You do the work. You show up and lift. Lifters lift. Dancers dance. Singers sing. The point isn’t the outcome; it’s the practice...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight I’ve never seen a codebase accidentally get simpler. Every “temporary” workaround, every “we’ll refactor later,” every “just one more feature” adds up. Complications tend to creep in. Slowly. Quietly. It starts small, many times unnoticed. It’s not malicious. It’s entropy. Without deliberate effort, all systems drift toward chaos. The teams that stay in flow aren’t the ones who...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read