Learning to Program in 2026

If I had to start over as a person who wanted to become a professional programmer, in 2026, what would I do? ...

January 16, 2026

Things I Don't Know, As of 2026

Here’s a list of the things that I’d like to learn about and have chosen not to specialize in (yet), as of 2026. ...

January 13, 2026

Getting It Right the First Time

There’s an enviable quality of great engineers I’ve known: they seem to get things right the first time. When you ask them to do something, and they say “It’s done”, it is, almost always. How? ...

January 5, 2026

Running Great Refinement Meetings

This year I’ve run over 25 Scrum refinement meetings; here’s what I’ve learned. ...

December 1, 2025

Always Be Ranking

Anytime you’re making a list at work, rank it. ...

October 23, 2025

Acceptance Criteria That Actually Work

Acceptance criteria, or AC, describe what a feature or bugfix does. Writing them is an art, and some AC work much better than others. So, how do we make them work? By including a little more detail. ...

September 30, 2025

Get Better at Debugging by Making Predictions

Shift to a proactive mindset by making predictions before any experiments in a debugging session. ...

September 23, 2025

Raise the "I'm Stuck" Flag

Consider this scenario. You’ve been given some work, and you’re stuck. Hours have become days. You’ve exhausted the internet. You’re starting to backtrack, delete work, and start over. Feeling defeated. To make matters worse, you haven’t told anybody. ...

September 10, 2025

Debugging Is a Story

Today I want to talk about a way I think about debugging: as a story that we tell to ourselves and each other. ...

September 9, 2025

Learning JavaScript Promises the Feynman Way

Want to learn a tricky topic and sharpen your learning skills at the same time? In this post, I’ll use the Feynman Learning Technique— a method of learning complex things by explaining them simply— with a sprinkle of LLM magic, to deepen my understanding of JavaScript promises. ...

August 25, 2025

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