Check the code you're reading is current
I was a minute from filing a fix for a feature that had shipped the day before. The reason I had not noticed turned out to be a rule of my own, doing precisely what I told it to.
Categories
30 pages
Campfire
The people side of the craft: leadership, careers, mentoring, and the story of the blog itself.
Three places a document can live
A spec, a how-to and a README walk into a repo. Only one of them should still be there in six months.
I went looking for the reason not to build it
The requirements were done and I hadn't written a line of code. So I spent a day trying to talk myself out of the whole thing.
Which one needs me next
A dozen agent sessions running at once is not a capacity problem. Working out which of them is stuck is, and the obvious way to find out is the wrong one.
Ready for human
I run a coding session per repository and they can't talk to each other. For a while the thing carrying messages between them was me, and I kept getting it wrong.
What I took back off the shelf
I put my working practice on a public shelf, and then took some of it back off again. Working out which half was the interesting part.
A website for the place I still call home
Rebuilding the website for a fifteenth-century coaching inn, which happens to be my dad's pub and the place I grew up in.
Who owns the pager?
The hard part of on-call is not fixing broken systems at three in the morning. It is an employer borrowing a life it does not pay for.
The feature your users are already faking
The one real user of my photo tool was already faking a feature with a workaround. That workaround was the specification.
What burnout taught me (more than once)
Burned out more than once across twenty years, and the point is that none of them looked the same as the one before it.
