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2024-07-09 · Note

Opinions.

A distillation of accumulated takes — strong opinions, weakly held.

Engineering

  • I would rather use a typed language than an untyped one. I've used Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Clojure, Rust, and Kotlin in production.
  • Lean hard on static analysis, types, and tests to thoroughly validate your code.

Leadership

  • Engineering is fundamentally about people. I care about how you feel — satisfaction, mental state, well-being. Happy, focused, driven people are the most productive, the best to work with, and the ones who help others do their best work.
  • I believe in essence and getting to the heart of things — reuse and systems thinking. I enjoy debugging, building mental models, and getting to the root of issues. I find joy in building those models with you, and I'm excited when I see you do the same.
  • I believe in bias to action. Our best option is to keep learning, explore the environment, and reduce unknowns. Action short-circuits debate, and I think that's the right tradeoff. I'd rather we do something 50% wrong but learn something than wait and do something perfectly after a long delay. Incremental change and course correction beats initial precision.

AI

  • The anthropomorphism of AI is a net-negative for humanity. Pundits are deliberately misinforming users about what these systems can and can't do.