Category: musings

  • Favorite Resources for Keeping up to Date in the Industry 2024

    Working in an industry that moves as fast as software requires constant work to coninue to be "in the know." Here are the resources I’ve enjoyed this year! Slack Rand’s Leadership Slack. I initially found this slack while reading The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly. It’s a large community full of very smart people…

  • Misc Tools I’ve Found Useful, October 2024

    I don’t gatekeep. Habitica I have this as an app on my phone. It gamifies habits, chores and to-dos. It sounds silly, but it really has gotten me to regularly do those things I know I should do but can easily ignore (ie. daily stretches, oil changes, reading, personal projects, blog post writing…) I’ve also…

  • How LLM’s Unlearn

    Or more accurately, can they? How Do LLMs Know Anything? Large Language Models (LLMs) “know” things by learning from vast datasets. How does that process actually work? It begins with data collection, pulling information from a wide range of sources like books, websites, and social media. This raw data is then broken down into tokens—smaller…

  • Job Stories: My New Favorite Way to Capture Requirements

    I didn’t think 2024 would be the year I threw out User Stories in favor for something new. But here I am, unable to stop talking about their replacement: job stories. Let’s take a few steps back. What is any of this? User Stories have been the cornerstone of software development since the dawn of…

  • Approved! How Talking to People At Work Increases Success Part I: Nemawashi

    Nemawashi is a technique for getting people on board with an idea before going through a formal approval process. In other words, “don’t call the vote unless you have the votes.” This perfectly describes one of the more successful techniques in affecting change I’ve encountered. Traditionally used in the context of proposing big changes or…

  • Murky Consent in Software: GDPR & CCPA

    Murky Consent in Software: GDPR & CCPA

    I was working in ad-tech when GDPR went live in 2018. It was a fever dream of sitting in stuffy meetings with product and leadership as they tried to decide what exactly counted as PII (Privately Identifiable Information), what did not and how much of a pain it would be to completely remove that information…