What makes large codebases so hard to reason about, and so hard to extend? I really want to find out because I'm tired of losing my mind working on them. One paper I love called "Out of the Tar Pit", by Ben Moseley and Peter Marks, argues that state is the main source of complexity in large software systems. […6 min read]
I just came across this TikTok video on Twitter and it broke my heart. It's a woman crying, utterly dismayed at how unfair life is, begging the totally legitimate question "how do people overcome poverty in America?" The comments are filled with stories like hers, lamenting the impossibility of that feat today, and they're not wrong. Many western countries are in decline and facing similar issues, but I'm singling out America here because those issues are amplified by a thousand there. […5 min read]
I get asked a lot for advice on becoming a software developer. I didn't study anything related to software in university, but now it's what I do for a living. I also spent about 3.5 years mentoring with Lighthouse Labs, a local web development bootcamp, and watched (and would like to believe at least in some cases, helped) hundreds of people of every age from wildly diverse backgrounds get jobs as software developers. […13 min read]
I made a goal for myself in January 2020 to stop using Google products by the end of the year. That might sound like way too generous a timeline, but Google owned pretty much all of my data at that point, so it was a fairly large project. Plus I'm a slow and steady kind of person. I know if I give myself a generous enough timeline I can accomplish even things that seem too hard for me at first. […12 min read]