Engineering
9 articles · all categories
September 2024
Why software projects fail
5 common themes
August 2024
What helps you ship confidently?
Been thinking about what needs to be in place for engineers to ship with confidence
July 2024
DRY – the common source of bad abstractions
Swizec reveals the hidden pitfalls of overusing the DRY principle in coding, leading to bad abstractions. Discover how to write adaptable, efficient code that avoids these common traps.
Scaling Fast, my talk on lessons from tech startups
This talk from C3Fest summarizes the key lessons I've learned in the past ~15 years of working in tech startups. It's a high level overview of a new book I'm writing (60% done).
You can't side-quest a product
Here's a trap that talented engineers fall into all the time. It creates frustration, burnout, and the genre of tweets that read like "Why don't people care about the amazing work I'm doing".
June 2024
6 books engineers should read
Here are 6 books I'd buy every engineer who joins my team, if I ran a team. You might like 'em too.
It’s okay to just do the work
Not everything needs to work forever. Start by solving the problem
October 2023
Solve the problem, not a different more difficult problem
Solve the problem at hand, not the one you imagine might come next. A simple fix now often beats a complex one later.
September 2021
How to rewrite your app while growing to a $100,000,000 series B
When you're in a company desperately trying to meet demand, *ship*. You'll have money, time, and professionals to fix code later. Even if you start with jQuery.