I had an interesting conversation with a colleague after my last post, about whether it was possible to get the best of both worlds, or if any new tool would necessarily make you dumber. And I had to stop and think – what was it about an IDE with autocomplete that seemed unobjectionable, while LLM-based […]
Having kids is weird. Here are these human beings, with their own interests, likes and dislikes, and absolutely no knowledge. I mean yes, over time they build up experiences, but they start out with literally nothing. You have to teach them how to go to the bathroom, how to use a knife and fork, how […]
Buckle up. I grew up in the 1970s. I remember going to the Simon Wiesenthal Center as a child, meeting Holocaust survivors, hearing the stories, seeing the tattoos, watching videos of camps being liberated, looking at pictures of dead, emaciated human beings stacked like cordwood. Adults in those days didn’t shrink from talking about the […]
There’s a joke I like to tell my teams. Senior engineers nod in gruff acknowledgement, and junior engineers tend to laugh nervously and nod with (I hope) enlightenment. It goes like this: If you’ve been working on a piece of code for a while, and it works the first time you run it, junior engineers […]
When a new person joins my team, I like to have everyone go around and share some unusual fact about themselves. It’s a good ice breaker – everyone usually tries to think of something interesting, and I’ve had people who were bus drivers, sky divers, and in one memorable case, someone who’d eaten something he absolutely […]
This is going to be another short technical post. As I mentioned previously, I’ve been coming up to speed on a set of new technologies in preparation for a new job (more on this soon!). I started building a site in NextJS, and have since decided that: Normally, I would build a server in my […]
Hi everyone, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted, but I’ve been fooling around with a new personal project, and I wanted to share some of what I’ve learned. At a high level, I’ve been writing a new website (mostly as a way to learn some new technologies and practice some old ones), and […]
Of course I told you. I didn’t tell you? Are you sure? Well, maybe I told your brother twice. – my mom I wish I could say that I’ve always set expectations consistently across my teams. That I’ve sat down with each of my direct reports and, based on their level, given well-defined explanations of […]
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not, shall we say, fashion forward. Or fashion anything, really. My tastes run towards jeans and black hoodies, mostly so that I never have to think about what I’m going to wear. So, it’s come as a bit of shock to friends, family, and colleagues that I’ve taken […]
I didn’t do that well in physics. It was one of the engineering requirements for a CS degree, but I wasn’t that interested, pushed it off as long as possible, didn’t spend much time on it, and immediately forgot most of what I’d learned moments after taking the exam. Fast forward a bunch of years, […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 