The SDLC of My Dreams
I’m very fond of the SDLC system I’ve recently built. It offers the high-level ergonomics I’ve always wanted without creating such a complex mental model that inspecting and debugging is difficult. An overview…
Tech
28 posts
The Effectiveness of AI Agents Is Becoming an Almost Religious Debate
Both extreme views are wrong, but the optimists are closer to right
The leak of Claude Code’s source code yesterday provided a lot of opportunities to dunk on the bad code produced by AI agents.
Shipping Like Crazy
This is my direct report Claude and my other direct report Claude
Over the last few weeks, I’ve become the product leader of a small organization, directing a team of top-notch, highly-independent engineers…. I’m commanding a fleet of Claude Code agents.
Agentic Coding in 2025
2025 was the year of agentic coding for me. Perhaps the first of many. I tried out Claude Code in June and then subscribed to Cursor soon after. Since then, I’ve been using both frequently. I’ve got some thoughts.
What I've Been Up To: Claude Code
It's pretty fun
This last week I visited Portland with some friends. I had some tremendous coffee, good food, and interesting long runs (using some new shoes!). But the main thing on my mind has been AI coding agents…
Tech Debt Is a Limited Metaphor
It breaks down when you look too close
Long ago, doing things the fast way instead of the right way was nicknamed “technical debt” in the field of software development. However, analogies have limits.
The Tool Lifecycle Trap
Investing in speedups that don't become speed bumps
Good tools save time and free users from repetitive tasks, but only if they’re adopted (primarily) organically….
The Interpreter Has Been Crafted
Just two short years later
It took two years, but I finally finished building an interpreter.
Implementing Semantic Search
Easier than it sounds
Sometimes when you’re searching for a digital record, you don’t remember the precise wording of the original entry…. Semantic search attempts to compare the meanings of words and phrases instead of the characters.
Tasks and Dates
There's much more than just due dates
Tasks. So simple that every online app tutorial uses them as example data. But try to build a practical task management app and you’ll quickly discover that there’s a lot of complexity to them.
Building a Locally-hosted Todo App
A practical tool using a practical tech stack
My life is held together with the Todoist app … but it’s just not a good fit for work in the corporate world. And that led me to a practical side project.
Hosting a Full Stack App for Free
With staging and production environments, secrets management, and automated deployment
For the last year or so, I’ve been chipping away at a side project: a weightlifting-tracking app. The ostensible purpose is to store the metrics I want and make data entry as convenient as possible, but in practice it’s mainly a way for me to become more familiar with the development of a “large” web application and the challenges that come with it.
Errors as Values in Rust and Go
Rust reminds me a lot of Go. Both languages eschewed exception-style error handling, a feature present in almost every language that’s popular in industry. However, the idioms they use instead are very different.
Chips 101 and Nvidia
Last week, Nvidia’s stock exploded…. The AI arms race has heated up and is even getting the attention of normal people through stock prices (among other news), so I’m sure this won’t be the last time I explain GPUs to someone without a computer science degree. I’m using this post as a chance to organize my Chips 101 talking points.
Python Exceptions: Bonus Content
Let’s cover a few more advanced aspects of the Python exception system. We’ll move a bit faster and talk at a higher level than we did in the last post.
The Basics of Exceptions in Python
Errors flow differently than regular data; if not “handled”, they rise up through the entire function stack and crash the program…. What exactly needs to be done in that “handling” step typically depends on what went wrong, and so there are many types of errors.
Careers in Programming
I recently visited Westville Correctional Facility, an Indiana penitentiary, to talk about jobs in the field of computing.
Crafting Interpreters
In January, during some time off between jobs, I started working through Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom. There aren’t that many accessible books for programming language design and implementation, so discovering the book (and that it was free to read online!) was very exciting.
Timezones
24+ Places (and Times) to Lose Your Mind
Probably once a year, I end up back in the same discussion about timezones. I don’t like timezones and apparently I bring that up a lot….
Is PyScript a Big Deal?
I went to PyCon a few weeks ago and while there, saw Peter Wang’s keynote on a new project called PyScript. I think that’s going to have a significant impact on the Python world, though maybe not in the way you’d first expect.
Apartment Hunting with Python
I recently crossed the 9-month mark as a Chicago resident. The time has come for a big decision: renew my lease, or make the move to a new apartment?
Apple Music Had Its Chance
With the announcement of Apple One in September, I decided to reevaluate my loyalty to Spotify. If Apple was going to offer me a (slightly) discounted rate if I went all-in on their services, I wanted to have a good look at Apple Music and see if it could replace Spotify for me…. After almost three months of use, my conclusion is that I could live with Apple Music, but I’d happily pay a small premium for Spotify instead.
State of the Tools 2020: Hardware
I spend a lot of time on meta-productivity: thinking about how to get work done better and faster…. Below is a fairly comprehensive list of the tech I use regularly.
Scaling Data Science Across Python and R
My colleague Brad Boehmke and I made a guest appearance on the Talk Python to Me podcast to talk about the challenges of supporting a large data science department that uses both R and Python. You can listen to the episode on any podcast player.
Linux for Data Scientists, Part 1
I contributed a walkthrough to some basic Linux utilities for data scientists to the 84.51˚ tech blog.
Automation at 84.51˚
My colleague Dominick Ghirardo and I wrote a short piece for our company’s tech blog on approaching automation in data science.
Setting Up Raspberry Pis (the Full Version)
I’ve set up three Raspberry Pis over the last two days…. So after the first two this weekend took me a lot longer than they should have, I realized it was about time I documented my process and made it repeatable.
Web Speeds Trends
I published a longer piece on Syntact, exploring data on internet speeds gathered on a raspberry pi in my apartment.