I had a tough week, a week ago. My manager pointed out some of the negative side effects of my aggressive adoption of agentic coding, prompting me to rethink how I’m approaching my work.
Continue reading “Agentic coding growing pains”Tag: engineering
The AI Landslide Is Happening
When it comes to AI changing the tech world, we’re at a juncture where you’ve either:
- seen some shit with your own eyes or you believe your imagination of where this is going
- or, you haven’t and you’re dubious
It feels like people are living in a fractured reality. For the moment, that is stable. But reality is not completely subjective. The way we each get to live in the world is shaped by things outside of our subjective perspective. That is going to hit all of us, regardless of what we believe.
Continue reading “The AI Landslide Is Happening”GraphQL was not the future
Six years ago, I wrote Is GraphQL The Future? for the Artsy Engineering Blog. At the time, I thought it was possible devs might bypass REST and reach directly for GraphQL when designing APIs. We can now confidently say that the answer is “no”, but I’m still very proud of that piece, and I think I was right about a lot of other things.
I find myself revisiting GraphQL for the first time since working at Artsy, and the piece has been a useful refresher. I think I really nailed describing what GraphQL actually is, rather than analogizing it to things it has fundamental differences with.
So, what happened to GraphQL?
Continue reading “GraphQL was not the future”Meet HyphenTech
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?
Continue reading “Meet HyphenTech”Expand Your Mind With One Weird Trick
In some ways, the story of my career is taking stretch opportunities that require me to jump into the deep end of unfamiliar territory. At this point, one of my key skills is knowing how to navigate situations where I have a lot of unknowns. I want to share a technique I have developed, which has been immensely powerful for me. Let’s call it mental model rewriting.
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.
Continue reading “11 Principles of Engineering Management”
Never Down, Always Up 