The Parable of the 2x4s

Steve was a super likable guy who recently got out of the Navy, so naturally, had a ton of excellent drinking stories involving far-off ports of call and exotic locales in the south Pacific. While he wasn’t super skilled when it came to the trades, Steve could handle a saw and a t-square, so he worked as a kind of floater—going back and forth from area to area where there was need for roughing in.

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Chicago & the Sandwich Deliveryman Hypothesis

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I lived in Chicago for 14 years, and during that time, before going into tech, worked as a grocery bagger, a cashier, a caddy, a lifeguard, an elevator operator, a landscaper, a knife salesman, an adult literacy advocate, a portrait framer, a shirt steamer, a forklift driver, and an usher at Soldier Field. Eleven of those years were spent working in the restaurant business—as a line cook, dishwasher, busboy, waiter, barback, bartender, and shithouse sommelier. I learned how to size people up based on their accents, cuff links, shoes, conversation topics, and the kind and quality of bullshit coming out of their mouths. The time I spent in Chicago, working these weird jobs makes me (I think) a crackerjack spotter of a whole range of put-ons, bullshit, ass-puffery, and weasel wording.

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Being a person who is very very computer

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The internet is really good at helping you waste time – often during the pursuit of a work-related goal. Something like that happened to me this evening while I was hunting down the answer to Proxy server & NET:ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID . By 7:45, I found myself reading the origins of Care Bear tummy symbols. This post is a recap of my findings…

One Useless Fact: An Origin Story

During covid lockdown – when my engineering teammates were confined to their homes, just trying to deal with long stretches of boredom and depression – the preambulatory chitchat of agile standups took on greater importance. So I took it upon myself to always have a few well-researched miscellany in my back pocket. When I left my job, I decided to continue sharing useless facts with my teammates.

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Illusions of Explanatory Depth (IOED)

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In 1993, everyone seemed to know of a pool cleaner who could also build a web site. That’s no longer the case. Now, there are too many sub-disciplines within software engineering for a single person to know how to design, build, test, and deploy a secure application from scratch. Most software engineers know this, but some are convinced they know more than they do – a completely normal phoneomenon known as the illusion of explanatory depth.

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If Anthony Bourdain built CI pipelines, they would contain exactly Zero bullshit

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Inferred competence is the act of correlating performance of a highly complex range of tasks from a single performance of one (or a few) tasks. When Anthony Bourdain wanted to hire a cook, he’d invite the candidate into his kitchen, and issue a single command: Make me an omelette. A thoughtful CI pipeline tries to duplicate that same simplicity.