Posts
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Loops
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of my first programming lessons. I must have been 8 or 9, and I had picked up a Visual Basic textbook that was wedged firmly in the family bookshelf. The first exercise was programming a dot to move one space on a board on the screen. It was fascinating and wildly rewarding, but as you know, this story isn’t about moving that dot one space. This story is about the next lesson — how to move that dot again and again and again in just a couple more lines of code.
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Everything is Text...
I’ve been writing code with LLMs for nearly two years. I’ve tried all sorts of tools, pushed tools through every workflow. But the breakthrough wasn’t a new app or model or even a better prompt — it was the humble markdown file. Plain, portable markdown text. With LLMs, the game is in how you get your context to the model. And the more you treat as text, the more you unlock.
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You Are a Prism
In his seminal High Output Management, Andy Grove captures a key management role: filtering information. Managers do this in two directions. As a manager, you take in organizational context and distill it down to the key pieces your team needs to be successful. Similarly, you take all the information your team is creating and distill it for leadership, your manager, and your peers. You filter information, sharpen it, and pass it along.
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Start with Your Feet and Look to the Horizon
Having mentored and managed numerous Engineering Managers, I’ve often seen them navigating new, sometimes overwhelming, leadership challenges. Whether they’re onboarding onto an unfamiliar team, building a new team from scratch, or leading through significant changes like a shift in scope or a key team member leaving, the uncertainty can be daunting.
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Push vs Pull Learning
As a software engineer, you’re always in learning mode—whether it’s a new tech stack, a fresh codebase, or an unfamiliar domain. When someone on my team is onboarding to something new, they often ask me, “What’s the best way to get up to speed?” The answer varies, but I find it helpful to discuss two key approaches to learning: push learning and pull learning.