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In which we debug a production bug (loosely based on a real bug at Lyft) and check its fix in the TLA+ model checker!

What Math ✨ can bring to your daily toolbox of programming tools to write robust, concurrent programs: a light introduction to TLA+.

What career move will give you maximal exposure to technologies, industries, and orgs? Why you should consider a stint in consulting as part of your career path.

At 23 years old I decided to quit my first full time tech job and take a year off to figure out my life. Was it worth it?

If you've ever cruised Hacker News or Blind, you'll know there's an intense obsession with passing the interview loop at big tech companies like FAANG. This is a post for early-career engineers and those looking to break into the field. As someone who's failed SO MANY of these loops, I'm here to tell you to relax.

Struggling with the responsibilities of being a new manager, I received encouragement from an unlikely person. This next post is a short one. It's about the power of encouragement at the right time and place.

I'm committing myself to an article a week on this blog while on paternity leave in early 2022. Today's topic is on how I'm recovering and reorienting myself after a disorienting 2021.

So you've set your sights on a staff-plus title, or you're looking to grow in your role. How do you proceed?

What can semiotics reveal about the hidden cultural frictions in distributed software development?

Sometimes, our most dearly-held beliefs and practices are the very things that keep us from succeeding in new leadership roles.

Cool, we've got swarms of empowered ICs working on their newly ideated projects. How do you keep the team holistically moving toward the right goals, without having the superpowers of a PM on hand? You improvise and hand out some hats.

When individual empowerment is your radical idea, then you commit fully to it with the Engineer as Project Driver. All engineers, no matter their experience, are given the responsibility to take a project from start to finish and own the outcomes.

How do you teach engineers to think like PMs? You give them the awesome and scary responsibility of choosing their work. Our team learned how to think and prioritize strategically by collectively building an Idea Backlog where we dream up and prioritize impactful projects to tackle. Here's how it works.

Can a team with a recently-departed product manager learn to survive on its own? How we built a bottom-up product development culture on my team at Lyft.

If you've worked in tech long enough, you'll hear praise for Andy Grove's High Output Management, oft-praised as a touchstone of technology management (Grove is often referred to as the "Father of the OKR"). A year or so ago, I got to read his book through Harrison Metal's General Management course. What can you apply from the book when you're a tech lead, and not actually a manager?

For all the toil that went into developing the pipeline and deep learning model for my ML baby monitor project, I discovered that my model didn't actually solve the problem at hand. This kind of gap exists in the real world of ML development as well, and there's a critical insight from the field of User-Centered Design that could be the key to bridging it.

Over a year ago, I wrote a couple of blog posts about how I trained a TensorFlow model on audio clips of my crying baby so I could get some insights into his sleep patterns and behavior. I distilled this experience into a PyGotham talk titled "Can Neural Networks Make Me a Better Parent?" and it reflects some extra maturity in my machine learning knowledge, as well as some hard-won parenting wisdom and experience.

It's been several years since I've come off of my former role as an engineering manager, and with enough humble introspection I've had several insights into the mistakes I've made, and how I'm integrating those learnings into my teams nowadays.

A discussion about why I enjoy working in the XP-school of Agile. (tl;dr: I enjoy working in a pull-based work stream. I like that pair programming, TDD and other best-practice batteries are all included.)

In which we train an TensorFlow model with the tears of my little one, then deploy it on a Raspberry Pi.

How do you deal with the travails of colic and new parenthood? You plunge yourself into an ML project, of course. Here, we discuss a naive solution to detecting baby cries via an onboard microphone on a Raspberry Pi.

While it’s been pretty quiet around these parts, I’ve kept the technical blogging up over on my employer’s blog. I’ve got quite a few posts around Elixir:

I posted an article on Medium titled “Wejoinin at Ten” describing our experience developing Wejoinin over the past ten years as a long-running passion project - and talk about the directions we hope to be taking it in the next ten.

I recently published a post on the Carbon Five blog titled “Evented Rails: Decoupling complex domains in Rails with Domain Events” that takes some of my thoughts about moving a Rails app to use Domain Events - leveraging the power of Sidekiq (or your job runner of choice) to send async messages between different domains of your app.

The first question you may be asking is - why would I want to go from Rails to Java?

You’ve resolved to build your company’s Next Big Thing in Phoenix and Elixir. That’s great! You’re facing a problem though - all user authentication and access concerns are performed on your Rails system, and the work to reimplement this in Phoenix is significant.

One common pattern in Domain-Driven Design is the use of publish/subscribe messaging to communicate between domains. When Domain Events are created from within a domain, other domains are able to subscribe to these events and take action within their own domains, respectively.

I want to discuss a topic near and dear to my heart, and what I believe is at the crux of effective software design. It’s not a new functional language, it’s not a fancy new framework, a how-to guide to do microservices, nor a quantum leap in the field of machine learning.

As follows are some code snippets for using Knex.js for executing Postgres and PostGIS queries.

Much of RxJS involves working with backpressure - how to reconcile streams that emit/process data at different rates, without overloading the system. Much of that model is built with lossy handling in mind - it makes sense that when your system is under duress, that you design your streams to degrade gracefully (e.g. drop certain events, or rate limit them by chunking into windows, etc).

One of the confusing aspects about working with streams is diving into Rx operators that take a stream and fan out into multiple streams.

Going to Strange Loop was a huge check off my conference bucket list (lanyard?). I’d always heard about this slightly-weird, highly academic collision between academia and industry, skewing toward programming languages you haven’t heard of (or, at the very least, you’ve never used in production). I anticipated sitting at the feet of gray-haired wizards and bright-eyed hipsters with Ph.Ds.

A couple of months ago, I was tuning a Rails app for one of our clients. This client wanted to know how performant their app would be under load.

The following are some notes I’m compiling as I’m beginning a journey down the rabbit hole, writing an app in Swift utilizing the VIPER app development methodology

With my current fascination with tracking workouts and location-based-activities, I have been interested in how I might be able to rewrite some of my stats logic with FRP principles.

(This post originally appeared on the Carbon Five blog.)

Out of Storybook, a side project I’ve been doing for a friend, I had the opportunity to model the problem domain as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). It goes:

As an ultra runner, I am really into the mountains. As a software engineer, I’m really into data. So naturally, I’m interested in the intersection of both.

Blurb sent me off to QCon SF 2014 for three days.

Melody Meckfessel: Google/Cloud Engineering

Leslie Lamport: Programming is more than coding

Bruce Schneier: Security

If you’re familiar with Conway’s Law, it states:

With the famed “TDD is dead” debate around the Rails community largely coming to an end, I found myself referencing Martin Fowler’s article, Mocks Aren’t Stubs a good deal, trying to make sense of it in terms of how I write tests and code.

In one of my personal projects (Chordmeister), I’ve been trying to upgrade the code to be written in ES6 modules and transpile down to AMD modules with Square’s very excellent es6-module-transpiler project.

Chapter 2: Domains, Subdomains, and Bounded Contexts

It’s been approximately six months since I’ve entered engineering management. Here are some thoughts reflecting back on that season now.

In recent conversations with coworkers, the topic of Domain-Driven Design has arisen on more than a few occasions in design and architecture meetings. “Have you read it?” a coworker asked, “I think it’d help us a lot.”

I’ve noticed a bit of the buzz around Ember App Kit recently and decided to move Hendrix, my music management app, over from a Yeoman-generated Ember app to EAK with all its bells and whistles.

I’m starting up a new personal project involving Ember-Data and Rails (more to come). The gist of it is that it’s a pure frontend app engine built in Yeoman and Grunt, and designed to talk to a remote API service built on Rails.

Heard an awesome Ruby Rogues podcast recently: “Decomposing Fat Models”.

Janky is a Github-developed Hubot + Jenkins control interface. It’s developed to be deployed on Heroku. However, what if you need it to live on an internal VM? Here’s how I got it running on a Ubuntu (12.04 Precise) VM.

I’ve been hitting a lot of “Maximum file limit exceeded” dialogs after a long day at work – at any point in time I’ve got a kajillion Chrome tabs open, five or six Rails envs running (for dev and test) + Guard/Spork actively watching tests, and Sublime with another kajillion tabs open.

Rocket Fuelled Cucumbers View more presentations from Joseph Wilk

Well, the inevitable happened: I finally experienced a hard drive failure. It’s pretty incredible that in the twenty-odd years I’ve been around computers I’ve never had the horror of losing a drive.

Did you guys know that you can use the ‘[ ]’ brackets in HAML to automatically set the id and class on a tag, kind of like Rails’ tag helper?

What’s that? You want to write an expectation for an array but your method returns the Array in a nondeterministic ordering?

Here’s a list of things that have been annoying, or at least a bit frustrating using Ohm, the Redis ORM, in a Rails app. Beware to those who assume Ohm is ActiveRecord in new clothes. It is, but it’s not:

I should have mentioned this long ago, but I started work at Blurb in early August. It’s been a quick ramp-up and I’m loving it there, surrounded by smart engineers and great designers. I do Rails/JS work there, and I’m building a lot of chops around Agile/TDD methodologies.

mmtss is a loop station built for live performances.

My friends were complaining that wedding photobooths were too expensive to rent. Could we make one for them?

I’m on a team with BRUTE LABS, a volunteer-led design agency working on StudentsConnect, a prototype project making chatroulette-style interactions connecting students from the global North and South. Here’s a UX flow we worked on:

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”500” caption=”Is that Jon Chan I see? Yes it is. Photo credit Oakland Local.”][/caption]

Here’s how the installation looked on the day of the art show.

I just spent five hours trying to figure out why  none of the Firmata libraries for Python were working over my serial connection. I was wondering why the previous program remained on the board and none of the signals sent were hot.

So I got the poster printed, and the LEDs currently show through the board pretty well. This is good:

A quick update on the art project:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1926-a-shorthand-for-designing-ui-flows

Let’s face it: jQuery UI skins suck. They’re flat, they’re boring, they don’t pop.

A month ago I bought an ‘07 MacBook on Craigslist. No, it’s not one of those sexy aluminum hot rods, but it sure is pretty.

Here’s how to set up the excellent VMware-developed open-source Review Board and its [post-review](http://www.reviewboard.org/docs/releasenotes/dev/rbtools/0.2/) command line review creation utility to work with git and git-svn on your computer.

At work, we make good use of YUI 3. It’s a really well-thought-out framework, from sandboxing and deep namespaces to CSS3 selector support and lazy-loading modules through the Yahoo! CDN. One of YUI 3’s biggest features is the Widget framework, which specifies an object on the page that the user can tweak to his or her whims.

I had my first taste of Marmite last year while in Botswana. My South African roommate loved it, and encouraged me to try it and spread it on my toast. One bite and I gagged. It was like somebody mixed soy sauce and peanut butter and cranked it to 11.

(Reposted from the Wejoinin Blog)

Prof. Temple Grandin - Colorado State - “Autism, Drawing and Design”

From here on out, the speakers were a bit more unconventional, with more emphasis on the human interaction and experience side of things.

I’m here in San Francisco at UXweek 2009, sent by Riverbed, determined to learn all I can and rub shoulders with the best and brightest minds in the industry. It’s been a really cool couple of days so far. I’ve met some really cool designers and got to pick their brains on their team practices. The food, oh the food: it’s excellent (ahi tuna? creme brulee? smoked salmon? green tea cookies? Pinch me.)

I’m currently in Botswana, doing volunteer work at a nonprofit Christian agency called Love Botswana Outreach Mission. Among my responsibilities are helping out with the organization’s IT needs. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the organization is wired for 24/7 Internet access, despite being located about 10km out from the center of Maun, a medium-sized village.

One trend on the Web these days is to move away from traditional full-stack frameworks (like Rails) toward client-side, full-stack Javascript frameworks (among them Dojo, GWT, SproutCore, and Cappuccino). There’s been a lot of buzz about SproutCore and Cappuccino, because of their design elegance, shiny Mac-ness and promises of really rich client experiences. I’ve been checking them out and here’s some of my observations so far:

I’m looking to develop a Web application with a full-stack Javascript framework like GWT, SproutCore or Cappuccino. I’m making the decision to go with a Javascript framework over a traditional full-stack framework (like Rails) because:

I think I must preface this post with a bit of context:

Do any fellow geeks out there follow any GettingThingsDone (GTD) practices?

Many of you have wondered what it’s like daily indulging in the opulence that are the FAQQLY offices. Allow me to take you on a tour.