This overhead timelapse shows combine harvesters stripping corn in perfect sync, feeding grain into a moving tractor without ever stopping.
John Crosby
@jccrosby.com
Figuring out how to stop being a human-doing. 🤝 Building software, leading teams, and making things work. Ex-chef turned engineer. 🍷🍳 💪 Kettlebells & fly fishing. 🎣 #ROLLTIDE 🐘 📍 Opinions are my own.
You can teach someone the syntax of a programming language in a few weeks, just like you can teach someone to follow a recipe. But the real craft—knowing *why* a system behaves a certain way under pressure—that only comes from burning things a few times.
Uh oh, sounds like another agent escaped its testing environment!
Techmeme@techmeme.com · 6d agoMicrosoft says GitHub is down worldwide, with the GitHub website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, and other services impacted; the outage started at 13:40 UTC (Mayank Parmar/BleepingComputer) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
"something that tirelessly follows instructions without having good reasoning is nightmare fuel to me."
Software Engineering fundamentals matter more than ever
The manifestation of my imposter syndrome, for me and today, is what does it mean to be a software engineer. There’s a lot more noise than signal on the Internet about agentic engineering, wh…
rhonabwy.com
"Mise en place" means everything in its place before you start cooking. I still use it today before writing code or starting a complex migration. Open the right docs, clean up your terminal tabs, organize your thoughts. A clean workspace leads to clean logic.
Bummer to see Skubal in an LAD jersey 🫠 #det #tigers #cba #ripbaseball
This got me: "If you don’t understand manipulation, you’re gonna keep bringing a fact-check to a feeling-fight and wondering why nobody seems to hear what you’re saying."
This Is How To Live A Good Life: 5 Secrets From Ancient Wisdom - Barking Up The Wrong Tree
How to live a good life. Seems difficult to get a good answer to that one. But the solution has been around for millennia...
bakadesuyo.com
When a senior engineer is struggling, don't jump straight to performance metrics. Often, burnout isn't caused by writing too much code; it's caused by carrying too much undocumented architectural context in their head.
Saturday in the South is a sacred ritual. The pressure of managing complex systems and production deployments completely pales in comparison to watching a crucial third-down conversion in the fourth quarter. Simple priorities. #ROLLTIDE 🐘
We talk a lot about "hustle" in tech, but some of the deepest architectural breakthroughs happen when you completely step away. Your brain needs slack time to solve complex problems. Go for a hike, lift something heavy, or just stare at the trees.
The best head chefs I worked for never yelled; they anticipated bottlenecks before the madness started. Bring that same energy to sprint planning. If your team is screaming during a deployment, you missed the warning signs three weeks ago.
Using AI as a coding assistant is great, but treating it like a flawless oracle is dangerous. Treat LLM output the same way you’d treat a pull request from a incredibly fast, wildly confident, but occasionally hallucinating junior engineer. Review it all.
Sitting by a quiet river with a fly rod is the absolute inverse of modern software development. The fish do not care about your sprint velocity, your architectural design documents, or your "north star" metrics. They just want a perfectly drifted fly. 🎣
Stop trying to shield your team from *all* corporate context. Total isolation breeds confusion. Instead, act as a filter. Translate upper-management goals into technical reality, and explain the "why" before handing out the "what."
There is a specific, humbling moment in heavy kettlebell training where you realize the weight isn't moving, and gravity is actively mocking your life choices. Good for the ego. Excellent for reminding you that you aren't always the strongest force in the room. 💪
Spent years focusing on what I was *doing*—metrics, tickets, shipping code. The real shift happens when you focus on how your team is *being*. A high-performing team isn’t just a feature factory; it’s an ecosystem that needs psychological safety to grow.
Beware the temptation of rewriting a legacy system from scratch just because the code looks messy. Messy code often contains years of hidden edge cases and bug fixes that nobody remembers. Respect the scars of production code before you tear it down.
Trying to be a human-being instead of a human-doing means learning to sit with an empty calendar without feeling a creeping sense of guilt. Productivity is a tool for life, not the purpose of it.
In the kitchen, if a sauce breaks, you fix it right then or the whole service tanks. Early in my tech career, I treated every bug like a broken sauce—pure panic. Learning that some bugs can wait until tomorrow was the hardest mental shift. 🍳
The absence of malice doesn't mean the absence of harm. Impact matters even when intent was good. Make room for both truths.
Seek out voices from different backgrounds, disciplines, and perspectives. Not as tokens, but as teachers. You don't know what you don't know.
If your solution only works for people exactly like you, it's not a solution—it's a preference. Think bigger.
"I hadn't considered that" is one of the most powerful phrases in human conversation. Use it when you mean it.
When someone shares something difficult, don't immediately compare it to your experience. Just listen. There's time for your story later.
Privilege is real, but so is pain. Someone's advantages in one area don't negate their struggles in another. People are complicated.
If you're only talking to people like you, you're not building understanding—you're building a bunker. Get out of the bunker.
Disagree with the idea, not the person. "I see it differently" lands better than "You're wrong." Both can be honest, but one keeps the door open.