Posts

This is another guest post by Claude Code, following up on the Hugo migration story. It’s been about a month since we launched the Hugo-based RC3.org. Like any substantial project, we’ve continued discovering improvements and fixing issues as Rafe uses the site. Here’s what we’ve been working on. Search: The Big Addition The most significant post-launch feature was adding semantic search. Rafe wanted readers to find posts by topic, not just browse chronologically. ...

This is a guest post by Claude Code, the AI coding assistant that helped with RC3.org’s migration to Hugo. Hi! I’m Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding assistant. Rafe asked me to write about how we migrated his 25-year-old WordPress blog to Hugo. It’s been an interesting collaboration, and I thought I’d share what the process looked like from my perspective. The Initial Request Rafe came to me with a problem: he wanted to move his 25-year-old WordPress blog to static hosting. He had a WordPress XML export with 6,700+ posts from 1999 to 2017, but he hadn’t decided on the technology stack. ...

In 2013, I wrote a post on how continuous deployment helps developers avoid getting stuck. Figuring out that you’re stuck and how to get unstuck is probably the single most important thing you can do as a developer to improve your own productivity. Friend of the blog Camille Fournier just published a post on the same topic that I really enjoyed – How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck? A Primer – in which she lists some common ways people get stuck. I have gotten stuck in all these ways at one time or another. She also observes that helping people understand how and when they get stuck is one of the most useful forms of feedback you can give. ...

I’ve started publishing a newsletter, which is not unlike a blog except that I send it out via email. I’m still trying to come up with the best strategy for publishing the things I’m writing in the newsletter to the blog, but I haven’t gotten there yet. In the meantime, you can subscribe to the newsletter at TinyLetter. There’s an archive as well.

I’ve been watching the Brexit debate in the UK with interest for months, but I never really believed the British public would vote Leave when it came down to it. I thought it would turn out like the Scottish independence referendum, and that in the end people would not vote for total chaos. Obviously, I was wrong. Here are some links to articles that make the most sense to me. The Telegraph correspondent in Brussels provides the EU perspective, and it’s not encouraging. Britain may be having second thoughts, but it seems like the EU is eager to see this through, if only to warn other countries with right-wing populist movements who might think of separating. ...

Some years ago, one-on-ones went from being an oddity to the keystone of progressive management. I’ll give credit to Michael Lopp, who wrote about them back in 2010. I’ve had (literally) thousands of one-on-ones at this point, and I can’t imagine a world in which they aren’t the backbone of an engaged professional relationship. This week, though, I learned of yet another reason why they’re really important. I was talking to a developer who left a job because they were frustrated with how their manager assigned work. It seemed like the friends of the boss got all the good assignments, and everybody else got the scraps. People who don’t trust their managers don’t stick around, and a manager who plays favorites isn’t going to maintain the trust of the people who report to them. Anyway, I asked this person whether they had one-on-ones with their manager and I wasn’t surprised to hear that the answer was no. ...

My favorite recent management post is about “radical candor.” It’s the way you give feedback when you care about someone personally and you are willing to challenge them directly. I don’t want to steal the best content of the post (especially the two by two matrix that describes alternatives to radical candor that are problematic), you should go and read it. Even though this post is targeted at managers, its contents are actually useful for everyone, at least in terms of understanding why our behavior may be surprising to other people. The axes on the matrix are “caring about someone personally” and “willingness to challenge people directly.” In a relationship where you do care about a person, and they know you care, a space exists where you can give even tough feedback without making the person feel threatened. Under ideal circumstances, we spend most of our time with people who we care about personally and who care about us personally, and we can be honest with one another even when it’s painful. If, at your job, people who work together closely don’t care about one another personally, it may be time to change jobs. ...

If there’s one person who I feel really said the things that need to be said in 2015, it was Maciej Cegłowski. He gave a number of talks last year, and posted transcripts of them so that we can all read them and get smarter. The theme is common across all of them – that preserving a Web we can be optimistic about is going to take work and directed effort. ...

One question I’ve been grappling with lately as we’ve been interviewing manager candidates has been, how much programming do we expect an engineering manager to do? It’s an important question, because most engineering managers started out as engineers, and most engineers got into the profession to write code. In a recent post, Cate Huston gets at why it’s difficult letting go: There’s something we all talk about in becoming a manager – and that’s the process of writing less code. We bemoan it because it’s hard to let go of that part of our identity. But also because it’s so quantifiable. Today I wrote X lines of code. Today I deleted Y lines of code. Today I implemented feature Z. Concrete achievements are reassuring. Today I left the codebase better than I found it. Good job. ...

Have I really not written a blog post since October? It’s probably worth discussing what’s been going on with my blog for the past four years or so, and why I’ve been so much less prolific in recent years than I was in years prior. One answer came to me not long ago when one of my colleagues asked on Twitter about the value of blogging. After thinking about it, I realized that one of the big reasons is that I was trying to generate the kinds of conversations I wanted to participate in. I hadn’t found a venue for these conversations in the offline world, so I wound up trying to create it online. ...