"Hit It Twice" Customer Service

I recently learned a practice for customer communication that I’d like to document. It’s called “Hit It Twice.” ...

March 4, 2025

How I Organize a Meetup

I’ve been organizing Meetups for a decade, starting with Vim Chicago and Chicago Elixir, and now running Maine JS from Portland, Maine. In honor of our most recent Meetup, here’s a list of my favorite organizer tips. ...

February 3, 2025

My Annual Review 2024

Here’s my annual review covering 2024. ...

December 31, 2024

Comfort With Discomfort

Today I’d like to talk about a quality that’s essential to success as a computer programmer. Let’s call it “comfort with discomfort.” ...

September 3, 2024

The Secret to Being a 10x Engineer

Our industry has a concept of “10x engineers”, individual contributors who have the impact of ten colleagues. How can you become one? I’ll try to answer that in this post. ...

July 26, 2024

Find Every Debugging Trail Marker

If you’ve ever watched me debug, you might think I’m moving slowly. That’s because I try hard to find every marker on the debugging trail. I believe this is one of the most valuable skills in debugging. ...

June 17, 2024

How I Review Code, Part 2

Reviewing code is tricky. When I’m doing it, I’m trying to achieve a few things at once. In this post, I’d like to document the ways I try to add value via code reviews. ...

June 6, 2024

How to Deliver Code Every Day

I recently calculated that I merge 0.8 pull requests every day into my team repo. “How to Deliver Code Every 0.8 Days” didn’t sing, so let’s say I merge about one PR every day, delivering one or more features to production. I like this velocity, and in this post, I’ll explain how you can achieve it yourself. ...

February 15, 2024

Practical Ways to 'Learn in Public' Now

I’ve been a practitioner of Shawn Wang’s ‘Learn in Public’ for years. In this post, I’ll share a list of ways I’ve found to learn in public. ...

January 28, 2024

Reflections on Ten Years Professionally Programming

I recently hit a decade of professional programming. I’d like to take a moment here and reflect on what I’ve learned. ...

January 9, 2024