I swear to God that all I’ve ever wanted was / A little bit of everything, all of the time

A week ago I forked a decade-old open source project and Nitro Porter was born.

If you’re half-done with a jigsaw puzzle and flip the table it’s on, what happens?

Many folks approach interviewing like an infinite avocado cart and they aren’t quite sure how to find a ripe one. Maybe if you have more people squeeze it you’ll figure it out?

Leaves from the vine / Falling so slow
Like fragile tiny shells / Drifting in the foam
Little soldier boy / Come marching home
Brave soldier boy / Comes marching home

This is a brief technical review of open source search index products currently available, summarizing what I learned about them in a couple days of research.

If you don’t invest in engineering leadership early you’re burning your salary budget. Once it’s time for process, you need someone who empowers your engineers and helps them operate safely rather than imposing rules that grind your releases to a halt.

How do I say this politely? If you’re the kind of leader who “puts the group before the individual” that usually just means you’re a bad leader and everyone knows it.

A moment of conceptual breathing room by putting forward a well-articulated, divergent view could save a ton of resources later.

I’ve studied many performance rubrics, skill trees, and advancement systems for engineering departments. Boiling them down to core principles can bring clarity when you’re up to your eyeballs in criteria, factors, and value statements.

When you’re building a software product, time always feels like your enemy. Co-opting an existing feature for a new use can feel extremely clever, like you’ve sidestepped a ton of work. But it doesn’t scale, it adds friction, and it adds danger.

As a white dude who can smoothly “pass” as straight and grew up with strong, educated parents in a very stable environment with a strong safety net, I had the privilege of approaching social power structures however I liked. And I chose deeply irreverent.

To me, credibility as a leader is fundamentally whether you’ve convinced me our interests are sufficiently aligned and whether you have the skills & motivation necessary to keep them that way.

Your company isn’t a family. Every time I hear someone describe their workplace as a family, it’s a red flag. It means one of two things: You’re squeezing people, or you’re earnest but inexperienced.

Shipping new features feels like it’s increasing the “moat” around your product because just look at all the time and effort it took. There’s just one problem: Features aren’t a moat.

I recently read “Why I wouldn’t invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one” by Wolfram Hempel and started to write a very long comment, but decided I’d just publish my own counterpoint instead.

I’m lately watching The Great British Bake Off. When I thought about why you couldn’t do a similar show about programming, I realized the hurdles to televising it are the same hurdles teams face anyway.

Why do I think so much about how people interact online? We’re at a rare moment of a tectonic shift in one of the great mysteries of the world: human society.

I don’t think many of us understand what a community is or how to support one. We’ve built a lot of software to help people talk, and very little to help them build community.