Leadership on Jake Worth

Genuinely Care

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:24:22 -0400

I often reflect on a conversation from years ago with a former Army boss. It’s foundational to how I understand leadership. He said that being a leader means you have to “Genuinely care.”

Catastrophic Mistakes Are a Team Failure

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 12:11:33 -0400

If people can make catastrophic mistakes on your team, the process is broken.

User Manual

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:51:03 -0500

Working with me? Awesome! I built this user manual to share my working style and communication preferences.

For those interested in building their own user manual, here’s the guide that helped me.

Work

What is your work and life setup?

I start work at 9 AM EST. As a team lead, I have a morning routine that includes focusing my day’s priorities, reviewing PR’s and tickets, moving my personal tickets work forward, reading emails, and following up on requests that I’ve made.

How to Start a Meetup Group (Lessons from Running One for 10 Years)

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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 my practical guide on how to start a Meetup group, based on what’s worked for me.

Being the Third Engineer

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 13:37:01 -0400

I was the third engineer hired by my company, not counting our technical co-founder. I like that position, and it seems to play to my strengths.

How to Run an Agile Retrospective for Leaders

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Retrospectives are one of my favorite engineering team practices. In this post, I’ll explain why and how I run retros.

How I Talk: My Guide to Tech Public Speaking

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been giving technical talks for a few years, and I’m speaking at the Vim Chicago Meetup next month about integrating React with Vim. In this post, I’m going to use that opportunity as an excuse to document my speaking process.

You Should Blog

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I created this blog to reflect on my code and development as a programmer. In that spirit, I’d like to make a pitch to anybody reading: you should blog.

Writing Elixir Sigils

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Sigils are a mechanism for working with textual representations in Elixir. If you’ve ever made an array of Strings in Ruby with %w(), the API is similar. A neat feature of sigils is that we can make custom variants, or override existing Kernel variants. The latter is generally discouraged.