Claude Code hooks are incredibly powerful but can be frustratingly opaque when you’re trying to actually implement them. Even though I’ve been writing software for 20 years, I found the official documentation to be confusing—it didn’t lay out a fe...
I had a conversation with a friend recently that crystalized something I’ve been thinking about for months. He was frustrated with agentic coding tools - expected them to excel at straightforward tasks like reorganizing files and fixing imports, b...
Ten years ago, I wrote about Dan McKinley’s classic blog post Choose Boring Technology and its resonance with my own development philosophy. My conclusion then was simple: when spinning up a new project, I consider whether I’m using it as an excus...
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, Abundance, makes a compelling case that American government has systematically eroded its own capacity to build things. Through decades of well-intentioned regulations, environmental reviews, and bureaucratic ...
Twenty years ago, I was working on Visual Studio at Microsoft when I had an encounter that still sticks with me today. I was manning a booth at a trade show, demonstrating new IDE features in Visual Studio 2005, when a developer approached me with...
