stuff I read

I hadn't thought much about how the fediverse works until stumbling across this post. Dan has an incredible gift for explaining each design choice of a complex system in a step-by-step way. Centering files as the source of truth that federated apps respond to like software helped me understand the AT protocol and the fediverse in a way that I hadn't before.

Engineering interviews are intimidating and stressful. Lauren's advice in this post is some of the most practical and actionable I've seen. A must-read for engineers at any stage of their career.

By the time I found this one, I had spent a fair amount of time chewing on whether programmers 'should' engage in programming as a free-time hobby -- but I had never considered the place of software in the domestic sphere as a gift of service to one's family or community. This was a huge revelation!

I'm intensely allergic to the (necessarily?) transactional nature of the LinkedIn-verse, and by association, deeply suspicious of 'networking.' This article about networking from Will Larson's blog -- a gold mine of career-focused engineering advice -- forced me to reconsider that suspicion and reimagine networking as 'maintaining the group of folks you can learn with along the way.'

Coming soon.

When I discovered this page, I was new enough to software development that a lot of the advice/wisdom I was discovering was still a little too abstract for me (e.g., Sandi Metz's 'Duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction': https://sandimetz.com/blog/2016/1/20/the-wrong-abstraction). I think one of the brilliant elements of Carson Gross's pearls of wisdom -- aside from the extremely funny presentation -- is that the caveman motif requires the advice to be pared down to an atomic level that any dev can digest. I didn't need to have worked on complex software or even been in the situations Grug describes for these ideas to make sense to me.

Coming soon.