Higher Value Tools

.main h2 { margin-top: 2.5em; } Last month, April 2022, marked the 10 year anniversary of my start as a professional programmer. I started programming earlier than that, but hadn’t been paid a salary. As a teenager I built websites and IRC bots and wrote tiny Python scripts. Then I stopped and played guitar for a few years. In my twenties, I...

I grew up in a what I now know people to consider a really small town. There wasn’t a lot, but even in that small town we had 2-3 lawyers. And to make a point about technology and how we develop software I want to paint you a picture of these German small-town lawyers with a very broad brush. They often have their office in their own house, a...

There’s a scene in Moneyball in which Brad Pitt’s character, the manager of the Oakland A’s, is watching a recording of one of his players trying so hard to run fast that he stumbles and falls. Lying on the ground he’s angry at himself, because he doesn’t realize that right before he started his run he hit a home run and scored the game-winning...

One of the eternal laws of the internet dictates that as soon as one person says they have a new thing that lets them type faster — a keyboard, a keyboard layout, an editor configuration, etc. — somebody else must say: “but typing is not the bottleneck!” What the second person means is that the first person is wasting their time. They’re...

Whenever I’m not sure whether I’m spending my time on the right thing I ask myself: does it help me ship? If what I consider working on is not the thing we want to ship itself, but lies in the vast grey area of software projects where I could write code all day long without the user ever noticing, this question helps me decide whether to drop it...