organizational culture
Feeling Stuck at Work
During growth periods, I learn something new daily. Each line of code I write is thrilling, every project plan has a broad impact, and I receive positive feedback every minute. Plateaus come abruptly.
Cassia Scheffer
I am a Staff Software Developer working across languages and teams. I write about the technical and cultural challenges of software development.
Weird LLM Apps
In the past few weeks, I've used Claude to make small apps that have sometimes been useful to me and other times just for fun. You can find the complete list of LLM-generated apps at weird.enumerator.dev. I don't really like any of these apps.
Ten Links from This Week
LLMs As a side note, I've called this category "AI" in the past. But most of these links are actually about LLMs, or predictive text thingamajigs that appear somewhat smart sometimes. I still see a future where my job changes dramatically because of LLMs, but I&
links
Ten Things I Read this Week
This week's post is a bit less organized because I was travelling this week. AI AI Codegen Workflow This is a great post outlining a workflow with prompts for using AI to write instructions for itself. Note that Harper switches models for different tasks. My LLM codegen workflow
Show Up With Questions
I'm on a podcast?!?!?! And I said smart things?!?!?!?
Excellent Engineers
An excellent engineer cares about the business, gets the job done, and confidently makes good decisions without guidance.
Using the Wrong Language Model
In the image above (transcript below), I asked an LLM to "tell me a fun fact," it responded with a somewhat correct fact that was a bit mundane, perhaps because I know more about owls than this language model does. But this is a good example of understanding
reading-list
Ten Things I Read This Week
Software Development Is Engineering Strategy Useful? There’s always a strategy, even if it isn’t written down. The single biggest act you can take to further strategy in your organization is to write down strategy so it can be debated, agreed upon, and explicitly evolved. Is engineering strategy useful?
ai
The New Old Skills
AI hype has created plenty of fear about being replaced by robot overlords, which has made me ask myself: What are the essential, non-replaceable parts of our jobs?
random
Good Hacks
[A] “good hack” was some feat of technical virtuosity undertaken for pure pleasure rather than necessity, like programming a mainframe the size of a dozen refrigerators to play a song. ― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes A good hack! This passage sent me down a rabbit hole of research on good hacks I
organizational culture
Problems that Matter
Problems that matter are problems business leaders care about. Learn what your business leaders care about and look at your work through their eyes.
ai
This Has Always Been the Job
AI is changing my job and yours, and it is a reflection of the failings of our socio-cultural and technical systems. These are two conclusions I've come to in my deep dive into AI developer tools in the past two weeks. And I'm not alone: * Test