I don't add Agent Skills unless I feel the pain of not having them. Vanilla Claude Code wins more often than the hype suggests.
A couple months back I realized my various attempts at finding a todo system that worked for me had once again left me with a steaming pile of crap.
Sitting with the discomfort of using agentic engineering when it doesn't feel like 'real' work yet.
Living next door to friends changes your life for the better. More time together, more serendipity & spontaneity. It's awesome.
Good documentation habits were already valuable — now they're a multiplier for working with AI agents.
It's really easy to speed-read a Twitter thread of hard-won insights & mental razors, but how much of it are you able to actually apply to your life in a meaningful way?
I also did not trust the hype after my previous AI experiences, so after trying out Windsurf and being pretty impressed, I wanted to give a more measured review with context on what I actually experienced - rather than you having to trust some random person on the internet.
I'm a hater and provide some ideas to improve a citizen experiment on whether flossing is useful conventional wisdom.
The trope of the 10x Developer has been written about ad nauseum, but there's another type you are more likely to meet in your career - the 0x Developer.
From ego to empathy: What a messy codebase taught me about engineering, collaboration, and eating elephants one bite at a time.
I can't tell you how to be a charismatic individual, but I can give some suggestions how to immediately kill another person's perception of you.
I want to have a concrete piece of writing I can look back on that details the business values that resonate with me, and that I would be proud to have my name attached to an organization that follows them.
Suprising & delighting users is a good outcome.
Programming languages that do one thing, and do it well.
My journey from sink-hugging champion to teetotaling extraordinaire.
Data removal services have a lot in common with the oft-discussed king of tax software - especially that they are disincentivized to improve the underlying problem for their users.
How could rational humans leave their dog poop on the sidewalk?
I'm turning off traffic analytics for my personal blog. It's a journey back to the heart of writing, finding solace in the quiet, and rekindling the pleasure of writing without the pressure of numbers.
The lack of a system is still a system, in the same way that the lack of a decision is a form of decision. You chose to delay making a choice. It's a choice to not expend energy making a system, and let one form organically out of chaos.
This is my living reference doc for to explore potential ways to reduce the amount of institutional knowledge a group relies on.
Pieter Levels uses money & life choices to optimize for freedom and simplicity.
I saw 'The Man in the Arena' - and he wears LED-tipped gloves and a snazzy hooded boxer's robe.
Slack is shutting down the functionality that powers the open-source app I built for Workflow Builder , their Nocode automation tool. I (hopefully) learned some lessons about what makes a good problem, the joy of enthusiastic customers, time-sensitive opportunities, and platform risk.
Money is relative to what we can purchase -$100 is very different to a pan handler vs a billionaire. How do we calculate our own "trivial" purchase price?
I naively thought I could apply the same complex & scalable solutions used by actual companies to my side projects. I was wrong.
DNS sinkholes like Pi-hole have to rapidly decide whether a new URL is allowed - what data structures might they use under the hood to enable quick responses?
A small collection of confessions from everyday devs at companies across the industry. When impostor syndrome strikes, they can act as a reminder that we're all human.
Not overwhelmed yet by all the Spotify Wrapped clones? Follow along to make your own Venmo Wrapped!
Icebreakers that don't suck, already tested in real-life rather than being written for SEO spam.
Finding a solution to parse unescaped double quotes in my JSON strings, with minimal tears.
Given a remote worker allowed to live in any state, how does their tax burden vary if they move?
A simple guide to self-host n8n in just a few minutes on fly.io.
Tired of hand calculating the total cost for your graduated pricing tier in Stripe? Me, too!
A simple guide to self-host a NocodDB Airtable alternative in just a few minutes, for free.
A simple guide to self-host an Actual server in just a few minutes, for free.
Let the nice robots at GitHub handle sending Venmo requests to your friends.
Widely useful skills & tools you will be asked to use in your career.
The simple steps I would follow if I got to re-do my college CS program.
You don’t have to be a software developer writing code to break into working at a tech company.
I thought sales was a distant concept from compilers and syntax errors...I've been a fool.
if a genie could snap their fingers and give you 500 hours to spend on anything, what would you use it for?
Confusing the tracking of habits as being enough to build them.
There's only so much time you can spend looking for shortcuts or trying to learn more before you need to buckle down and get your hands dirty.
90% of advice ends up wasted, so stop asking.
If the resume should showcase your skills, why is company pedigree the most eye-catching?
Maintain a toolkit to avoid shiny objects and be a quicker creator.
Removing negative elements of your day can be more effective than optimizing your time to perfection.
Help your friends nab the low hanging fruits of security posture.
Leveraging multiple strengths in concert to make the whole better.
Stockpiling your best ideas for a future audience won’t make you a better writer.
Incrementally remove Google from your life without having to rip it out immediately.
Desiring to be creative, but defaulting to consuming content to the extreme.
Ways to programmatically generate pages from data for Hugo. Automate your page creation.
Are you spending your minutes with intention?
A project person that can't seem to ship ideas.
Plugins to make Obsidian as comfortable as other note apps, aimed at those who want tools that don’t need tinkering.
Sourcegraph is a neat company building tools with great developer experience, but Github has CodeSearch, so why be bullish on Sourcegraph?
Lessons in developer experience learned from the best and worst tools.
An engine that unlocks the knowledge already within your company, no matter if it's in people or tools.
A reflection on my failure to build a viable product, so others can learn from my mistakes.
Lessons learned from a couple days spent debugging everything BUT the problem.
Only YOU can see the perfect vision in your imagination. Everyone else can only see what you've published, good or bad.
Over 9 months ago, I set out with a simple task: paint a 3-D printed Halo Pelican I was gifted. Do I have any experience painting miniatures? Tons, and none.
A college degree takes 4 years, a year or more to write a book, 10 years at the DMV. Facts...or are they? Life has no speed limits, so why treat them as laws?
With a few small tweaks, take the default terminal and make it uniquely yours - then watch your dotfiles evolve as you find new tricks for your toolkit.
Learn how to set-up the Pi-hole ad blocker on a headless Raspberry Pi Zero and connect your Android and Windows devices for maximum adblock protection!
Configure Obsidian for seamless daily notes by adding the Periodic Notes, Templater, and Calendar community plugins.
Most devs don't need a complicated setup for Python, they just need to get running. Leverage a single Docker command to run any version in isolation.
My Year in Review for 25. Ups, downs, and sideways.
A personal theme for my year of 26 to guide me to a fulfilling year.
How Cameo can find new revenue sources & expand their reach.
"If more information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs."
Do you want to be more than a code monkey? Learn to avoid blunders and become a superhero to your team.
Starting a project is easy. Consistently working on one after the initial energy has faded? Much more difficult.
This is a snapshot in time of the productivity system I use: what it is, where it came from, and where it might go.
My experience learning the language by building a small package.
It's so easy as a developer to dismiss the idea of learning no-code tools. After all, you know how to code, why spend time learning tools designed for those who can't?
Our days are filled with little decisions, problems where it's just not worth searching for the optimal solution. Yet we waste time digging into the details, anyway.
Let's break it down and see how you only need 99 people's support for your side hustle to make a drastic change to your life.
I'm starting from zero with no audience, no businesses, no published projects or big ideas. Putting a line in the sand to look back on, no excuses.
Your piece may be bad. The topic may be over done. It may get ignored. But for the chance your words resonate with someone, write.
We've all done it. You're scrolling through your phone, long past the "just a second" that you told yourself, when it hits you. Time Limit.
Ask yourself, "What did I do today that pushed me towards my long term goals?"
Don't lose your tether to the original goal
There are two versions of your life: the one you are living in & the one you dream about.
A quick list to know you are doing everything you can to endear yourself to your teammates on Slack.
I had nothing clever for 'hackathon', sue me
Don't hate the title hate the game