Category: Software

Meet HyphenTech

GenAI logo of my made-up term

I’m proposing a new term—HyphenTech—to describe much of the tech landscape, in order encourage a better understanding of our current era of tech. Thinking of every new company as a “tech company” is too generic to be useful, but going just one level deeper is helpful.

Everybody wants to be a tech company. It’s a proven path to trillion dollar market caps. However, that path has also proven extremely narrow, only admitting a few companies into the cuatro comas club. Have we had 15 years of bad startups, or is something else going on?

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The AI Big Bang

Image generated from stable diffusion from the prompt: big bang happening in someone's brain

I generated this image with the prompt “big bang happening in someone’s brain” using Stable Diffusion

2022 has been an astounding year in AI. I don’t think anyone needs a recap (and I’m not the guy to provide one), so I’ll namedrop Stable Diffusion and GPT as examples of what I’m talking about.

While only the most jaded person could see what’s going on in AI and not be completely blown away, there is debate around exactly what the socioeconomic implications of this new phase of AI will be. On one hand, you have people already predicting that we’re in the end game for white collar workers, such as artists, writers, and software developers. Other folks, perhaps more attuned to the limitations of the AIs we’ve seen, are urging a much more sober outlook. I see massive change on the horizon, but along a different axis than some of the more simplistic predictions.

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11 Principles of Engineering Management

More than 2 years ago, I decided to try to create a brief, digestible manual on the expectations of management for senior engineers at my company who are considering making the shift. At the time, I had about 3 years of management experience, including two prior companies. Enough to feel like I knew how to do the job, but not enough to feel like I should be some kind of authority on management. After letting this marinate for a couple years, I’m ready to share what I have learned.

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An epic Webpack mystery

Webpack logo

For reasons I’ll explain elsewhere, I’m building a desktop app, which stores its data locally. It’s built using Electron, a toolkit for writing desktop apps using web technologies. and it uses a pure-JavaScript database called NeDB for persistence. Pretty quickly, I ran into a headscratcher of a problem. My data wasn’t actually being saved to a file but I wasn’t getting any errors or warnings.

As it turned out, it wasn’t a bug, but a complex situation involving Webpack defaults. Understanding and solving this issue took me waaaaaaay down a rabbit hole, and I thought it would be informative to share the story.

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Hot Take From A New OCaml Developer

I recently started a new job at Arena.io. One of many things that attracted me to the role was that they proudly use OCaml. Even if you’re a professional developer, you might not know of it. It’s not a widely used programming language, but it has been highly influential on many of the most cutting edge programming languages. If you’re not an OCaml, suffice it to say, this post probably won’t be that interesting to you.

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