A practical and thoughtful guide for new engineering managers. Learn how to build agreements, avoid micromanagement, run effective 1:1s, and navigate your first months with clarity.
Something’s been bugging me about how new devs learn and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re…
Here are some of the most interesting things I learned at DjangoCon EU 2025 in Dublin, Ireland, partially written with the help of AI: link to talks
Mastering the full stack isn’t just a technical feat: it’s a human challenge, and no, you can’t git clone your way out of it.
Why you can't skip to the top (but you can skip to the bottom)
A reader, "Moo", asked me to write about my process for entrepreneurship and how I choose what to write on. Despite being a lifelong entrepreneur and being relatively successful at...
How are Rust, C++, and Python trending on Hacker News in the job market? As a proxy measure for programming language trends, let’s analyze the frequency of programming language mentions in the mont…
Here are 5 factors that make a bigger difference to software development outcomes than “A.I.” coding assistants, but teams don’t address because they’re “old news, gra…
Whenever a new piece of technology comes out (these days, mostly AI) I go to some effort to understand it. Usually I end up writing a post about it, so I can be…
A few weeks ago, I changed my Slack channel sections. I’m now more responsive and engaged, while also feeling less stressed. How? By sorting my Slack channels by urgency, or how often I want to read them. Versus Sorting by “how often” lets me read my most urgent messages first, focusing my energy on what
Every week, I tell myself I won’t do yet another post about the asteroid striking American academia, and then every week events force my hand otherwise. No one on earth—certainly no one who reads t…
When a pursuit becomes a drag, here's some questions to help you figure out why, and what to do about it.
Going indie looks like freedom from the outside. But once you’re in it, you face loneliness, pressure, constant decisions, user feedback, and all the invisible work no one warns you about. This is what the journey feels like, and why it’s still worth it.
Knowing what you're building
About 3 years ago, I joined a GameDev company, without any prior experience making games or hands-on exposure to this industry. Statistically, this time is not even enough to release a single game. But during that window, I was lucky to meet many talented people deeply involved in modern GameDev, who shared with me…
Recently, a colleague asked me for a code review on some complex UI changes. The idea was to make an...
Lessons on incentives and scaling from two years as a teaching assistant
And how to fix it with RFCs
I recently had an engaging conversation with Alex ( @veqq ) from the Lobsters community about computing, mathematics and a range of related topics. Our conversation was later published on the community website as Lobsters Interview with Susam .
If I could offer you a single piece of career advice, it’s this: avoid negativity echo chambers.
I've long had a fraught relationship with ToDo lists, because they're very much a double edged sword, but I'm convinced that much of the problem is t ...
Reddit discovered the funniest thing in tech this week, and it shows exactly how broken the AI narrative is. The newly released GitHub Copilot agent was given permission to make pull requests on Microsoft’s .NET runtime, and the results couldn’t be funnier. The AI confidently submitted broken code, while human…
could you pass the FAA's Air Traffic Controller (ATC) biographical assessment?
