Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline

Hand-Drawn Illustrations–A workflow argument

Programmers who create more files have those files modified by others more often

Should bugs be anti-holidays–infrequent and interruptive?

Developing Software in a Forest vs. a Desert

Why the Insurance Industry Rationally Fails Its Social Purpose

Product management is hosting a party, not playing chess

Humans >> Data – The Myth of Measuring Developer Productivity

TDD is Not Hill Climbing (except where it is)

Software design gets worse before it gets better

Not my money any more: Lessons from poker (2010)

TDD isn't software design, it's design *feedback

Coding in the Debugger (2007)

Timing software design: “Later, if that's responsible”

Publish Everything (Pretty Much)

Template for Impactful Ideas

Executive summary of bi-temporality–eventual business consistency

Emotions: A Code Book

Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in long-shots

Accounts/transactions enable you to replay history

Paint Drip People

More What, Less How: Coding with LLMs (but also every technical revolution ever)

I chose “empirical” to describe my style of software design

How I came to write “Tidy First?” tl;dr it took 18 years

Software design also saves money by discouraging errors

Accountability is not blame (but easily becomes blame)

Beyond Extreme Programming: Scaling to 1000s by reducing team dependencies

Boss' Dilemma: Taking Responsibility Signals Cooperation

Responsibility: Consequences Flow Towards Power

The Pie Problem: A performance assessment parable

Programmers Underpaid? Labor vs. Capital

Cloud development environments tame complexity by reducing state

Software design decisions are (mostly) reversible

Tune Software Development for Rate of Change, Not Rate of Progress

Work/life balance should be difficult

Fixed equity grants become toxic to hard work in later growth

Background Work: Establishing credibility by indulging engineering curiosity

A Death-Aware Career Plan

How Meditation Works for Me

Meta-meta-cognition: reflecting on mind-mapping my thinking habits

Meta-meta-cognition: reflecting on mind-mapping my thinking habits

Does Pay-for-Performance Perform?

Tech compensation is biased toward the long-term. Fine if you have a long term

We aren’t owed an audience for our “feedback”

Monolith -> Services: A Sketchy Approach

If you do what you're told, you're paid too much

Career planning: recommendation letter from 2023

My experiment with clear and direct communication

Expand to Extract and Back

Test Desiderata 12/12: Tests should be inspiring

Test Desiderata 11/12: tests should predict production

My Memories of Larry Tesler, Parent of GUIs and Slayer of Modes

Tests Should be Specific [video]

Test Desiderata 9/12: compose the results of tests to reduce the cost of testing

Test Desiderata 8/12: Tests should be isolated from each other [video]

Test Desiderata 7/12: Automated. Warning, this is mostly a design issue

Tests should be deterministic, with a goofy Gusto counter-example

Outcome Over Output: Also Impact and Effort

Output over outcome: 1/2 (with memoji)

Test Desiderata 4/12 tests should be easy to write

Test Desiderata 3/12 tests should be written to be read

Latency/throughput tradeoffs, illustrated with coffee

Test Desiderata 1/12: tests should be sensitive to behavior [video]

Decisions, Decisions or Why Baskets of Options Dominate

Publishing on Medium, with the stats they don't make obvious

Fast and Slow in 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract

Software Test Desiderata

Understanding legacy code with TCR (test && commit || revert)

3X: Explore/Expand/Extract at Facebook

Software design is also about relationships

Curiosity as a Service – Literally

“Testing” software design. A short feedback loop for design

Software Design is Human Relationships: Waiters, Changers, and Sufficiency

Development requires behavior and structure changes, setting up human conflict

To simplify review, have diffs change behavior or structure but not both

Narrowing an Interface in Tiny Steps

Buy Effort and Sell Value

Writing a book, still the same pain 15 years later

Delay Chokes Innovation, illustrated with a poker tournament

Objections are goals

Test && commit || revert, an alternative to TDD

Tiny Diffs, Instantly Propagated. Limbo on the Cheap

Publish everything you write (pretty much)

Publish everything you write (pretty much)

My Personal Mission

How Will I Measure My Life?