Or what I learned from years of working for cult-like founders I have always been deeply cynical about value statements. You know what I mean: those written lists of vague platitudes that companies try to cargo cult on top of an existing set of organizational processes. You’re supposed to memorize…

Don’t worry … it’s super easy 🙃 As some of you know, I’ve been working on a programming language and compiler. More specifically Fault is a language for modeling systems that compiles down to SMT. SMT is a form of logic programming that helps you reason about the design and…

See? I told you technology advances in cycles As someone who has spent a fair amount of my career rummaging around legacy systems, I’ve learned not to dismiss old paradigms and approaches. They always come back. Marketing gurus repackage them with different terms and pretend its something new, but technology…

It has nothing to do with latency and it’s making your systems more complicated. I’m fighting this ongoing war with the phrase “real time” at work. I want to eliminate it from our vocabulary — to the point where I periodically fantasize about standing up a Slack bot that auto…

As long as humans can blame the machine, they will use autonomous features incorrectly. The other day I watched the New York Times new documentary on Tesla’s safety record and Elon Musk’s role in exacerbating it. I knew about Autopilot and have ridden in a Tesla with Autopilot engaged (but…

Thinking about programming as just math and engineering robs programmers of critical skills they need to build effective technology For the last three years the emphasis in my career has been safety. I was first exposed to the community of safety researchers and practitioners at Strange Loop in 2017 and…

Practicing breaking down and generalizing problems into formal logic… for fun. Last month I talked about using formal verification in game design and the challenge of trying to define a problem so that it can be verified. This is part 2 of that story, detailing the various approaches I’ve been…

Random advice I find myself repeating a lot… “Those who should decide on the architecture are those that will be on call for it” Software architecture is fun. So much so that there’s never any shortage of smart people eager to jump in with their opinions. In my various engineering leadership roles throughout my career so far I have received many unsolicited architecture diagrams from ambitious…

The amazing things you learn by applying a tool to inappropriate challenges. I am designing a tabletop game. The idea came to me while cleaning out a box full of old conference swag I have collected from years of tech conferences. At one of the last four Shmoocons — or…