Posts

Abstractions in code are easy to add and challenging to remove. Sometimes we feel stuck with them. But the good news is, you can back out of almost any abstraction with the right mindset. ...

This year I built several Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to support ongoing R&D. Here’s my report. ...

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

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. ...

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? ...

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

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

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. ...

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

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. ...