Shows / Accidentally in Code
Episodes
- Accidentally in Code
My Personal OS: Many Projects, One View on All of It
For years my personal productivity system was Trello. I wrote about it in 2020: a board for life admin, a board for the recurring stuff, and a card each week…
- Accidentally in Code
The role of engineers in the software factory
The other week, I found a menu button in the wrong place on mobile. Floating around the middle of the page when it should have been anchored to the side. Two…
- Accidentally in Code
Escaping the No-Code Platform by Building a Software Factory
I’m not someone who gets called when things are going well. So when Michelle – the Twill CEO – called me in December, it was because she…
- Accidentally in Code
Judgement > Output
Credit: Flickr / Matt Cooper The benefit of conference season is talking to a lot of people (the downside: needing antibiotics), and of course many of those…
- Accidentally in Code
Attempting to reverse engineer code review
I keep hearing complaints about code review. About volume, about quality, about trying to take responsibility for code produced by colleagues who have…
- Accidentally in Code
Is the software factory working?
When we replatformed Twill, we built a software factory: agents write most of the code, a merge queue lands it, CI decides what gets through. Which means…
- Accidentally in Code
Good Architecture Is a Function of Time
Credit: linardi91 / pixabay Engineers, we use a lot of words to talk about architecture, but at a fundamental level, I think architecture is about making good…
- Accidentally in Code
Nine Months of The Spreadsheet: What AI Taught Me About How I Work
Credit: Google DeepMind / Pexels In February I wrote about The Spreadsheet: one tab per week, a column for each area of my life, and a green/yellow/red rating…
- Accidentally in Code
Book: Obviously Awesome
I’ve been trying to learn marketing lately. I would not say it’s going well. I started with a Coursera course, and one module in I was so…
- Accidentally in Code
What do managers even do now?
Credit: Paul Hudson / Wikimedia I watched an IC have a lightbulb moment: they’re a manager now. Running agents in parallel, giving direction, deciding…
- Accidentally in Code
Announcing: Breaking Into the Security Mindset
Image credit: Joe Groove Application security might seem like a strange thing to build a coaching course about. But the thing that makes coaching work is that…
- Accidentally in Code
Skills for a more leveraged workflow
Adapted from Mix and Match Robot expressions by anarres (Openclipart, CC0) I’ve been skeptical in general about sharing workflow skills. I have a bunch I…
- Accidentally in Code
The next weight
Something that comes up regularly in coaching is the idea that you get stronger against the weight you can lift, not against the one you can’t. If your…
- Accidentally in Code
The Date – Blunt Implement or Forcing Function?
On some of the worst run projects I’ve seen, leaders trying to get them back on track would set a date. Never, ever, in that circumstance, have I seen a…
- Accidentally in Code
What would make next week better?
Just about everyone gets overwhelmed sometimes, and many of us deal with that by working harder. This is a reasonable response to a single unexpected thing, or…
- Accidentally in Code
Book: Churn
Claude Steele’s first book Whistling Vivaldi gave me one of the most useful framings I have for bias. Stereotype threat: in a situation you care about…
- Accidentally in Code
Maturing our development process as an AI-first 2 person team
We’re doing a big release this week for DRI Your Career. Mostly bug fixes and reliability work nobody will notice, but the two things worth mentioning…
- Accidentally in Code
Self-promotion without the ick (thanks Claude)
To be brutally honest, this (making Claude my social media manager) all started because I felt inadequate about self-promotion. And being an engineer, my…
- Accidentally in Code
The Second Cohort
After the first cohort of DRI Your Career I wrote that the first time you do something, you can believe in it but you can only really hope. But we just wrapped…
- Accidentally in Code
Understanding the Game
I used to panic when someone asked me what I thought about an acquisition. I had vague opinions, weakly held, because I didn’t know enough to reason…
- Accidentally in Code
The Value of Getting Closer to the Work
Scaling The core problem of scaling a team is that not everyone can know everything. Scaling is the work of systematizing that – so that things are…
- Accidentally in Code
WordPress + Claude – a new look for cate.blog
If you’re reading this on cate.blog, things look different. I’m pleased with how it came out. Getting there was more difficult than I expected. I…
- Accidentally in Code
Useful AI skills for Engineering Leaders
The volume is up. More PRs, more pings, more incidents, more asks coming from more directions. I used to have 8 directs that dealt with most things, and…
- Accidentally in Code
Making a New Plan
Once, I got an email. To paraphrase, it said: I ignored your recommendation, but new evidence arrived, and now I see that you were right. I won’t do that…
- Accidentally in Code
The Joy of Scope Creep
I’m disciplined about scope. Ship the smallest thing that moves you forward. The feature you don’t build is the feature you don’t maintain…
- Accidentally in Code
The New Realities of EM Lyfe
A fascinating thing is happening. EMs are saying it’s better to be an IC. ICs think being an EM is where it’s at. This is part of the AI shift. The…
- Accidentally in Code
Force Multipliers
It’s harder than ever to be an engineering manager. Fewer resources, higher expectations, and a public conversation actively questioning whether the role…