in|retrospect
Posts on page 50
Shadow Systems
There’s the system , and then the system behind the system. I’ve written in the past about how the job of increasingly senior management is really about frameworks and mental models, that a big part of the job is…
Review: Exhalation
Exhalation is the latest collection of short stories from science fiction writer Ted Chiang. As with his previous book, Stories of Your Life and Others , the set of stories is collected and curated across a fairly wide range of settings,…
The Technical Interview Prep Cottage Industry
In writing about the software engineering gold rush, it was mostly through the lenses of my own career, observations made: * As a college student during the boom and bust of the dotcom era, * Through a career as a software engineer…
The Geography of EV Charging Stations
We've had our Tesla Model 3 for well over a year now, but never managed to take it on a road trip outside the Bay Area until this past holiday period, in part due to my concerns about…
Appreciation for Spreadsheets
The managerial stereotypes aren't far off the mark. I hate to admit it, but the vast majority of the time spent managing software engineers—when not synchronously communicating with people in-person—is asynchronously communicating with people through…
Year in Review — 2019
2019 marks the end of the second decade in the 21st century. I'm going to resist the temptation to do the thing where you look back at the past 10 years and try to sum up 3652.5…
