April 29, 2025

Don't Guess

This is a response to “Don’t Guess” from the excellent “The Best Programmers I Know” by Matthias Endler. My goal is to crystallize my understanding of this trait.

April 7, 2025

Your Software Is Confusing

If something in your software is confusing to a customer, it is confusing.

March 26, 2025

Why I'm "All In" on TypeScript

I’ve added TypeScript to several projects I’ve worked on. In this post, I’d like to discuss why I think TypeScript is essential and document my expectations around it.

March 4, 2025

"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.”

February 3, 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.

December 31, 2024

My Annual Review 2024

Here’s my annual review covering 2024.

September 3, 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.”

July 26, 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.

June 17, 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 6, 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.