productivity
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✉️ Drafting emails in Markdown
As developers, we use Markdown all the time: in documentation, GitHub issues, etc. Pretty much every tool supports it now, except email. With email, we are still stuck with a 2005 MS Word experience. Why Markdown? Once you know the simple s…
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🚀 Accelerating or Decelerating?
Is your work accelerating or decelerating? This may be hard to measure, but in our gut we know. A few ideas: Where do we spend our time? Moving things forward, or just keeping things afloat? Are we releasing more or less often? How about t…
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💻 Why the terminal still matters
Starting in the 1970s, the terminal, popularized by Unix, has been a mainstay in computing. Many developers today, and increasingly non-developers, are using the terminal. In previous years the terminal was defined by a physical monitor and…
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📧 How to solve the email problem?
How many hours go into just processing email? One reason it’s so consuming: when a message hits the inbox, it feels like it needs a response. It feels like real work. There are several ways to handle the “too much email” problem: Ignore it…
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⏱️ How do you find time for higher value tasks?
Do you (and by extension your organization) find yourself mired in minutia and struggling to find time for higher value tasks? What is the solution? You can hire more people to do the lower-value stuff (a perfectly valid approach). You can …
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🚀 Platforms are not just for developers
This is an interesting post from a Marketing person creating website pages: I built 19 website pages in a single day while my team was out for US thanksgiving. Not mockups. Not placeholders. Actual, shippable pages: a full partner ecosyste…
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🔀 The division between group and personal workflow
When thinking about developer workflows, tools, and resources, dividing them into two categories proves useful: personal and group. A group resource is something that multiple people use (or should use): SDKs, libraries, linters, formatters…
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📝 Tips for working with Markdown
Markdown is now a nearly universal format for documentation in many workflows. A few tips for being effective with Markdown: Use a standard editor most of the time (VS Code, Vim, Helix, etc.). This is faster than graphical “Markdown” editor…
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🔀 The Power of Git* workflows
Git + Git hosting platforms enable both local and cloud-based workflows. Local: Lightning fast access to files - leverage the power of your local computer Use powerful native tools (editor, e-cad, m-cad, AI agents, command-line tools, scri…
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✍️ Why writing is important
Some people are wildly successful without writing. So, if the goal is only to make a lot of money or have a lot of power, this advice may not apply. However, for those who want to: Think better Scale ideas beyond direct personal contact Ca…
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🛠️ The new Artisan Age
We live in a world of powerful tools. Milwaukee battery-powered hand tools, high-end PCB design suites, cloud platforms, open-source tools, etc. And while these tools get us a good way toward the goal, they do not do everything. Additionall…
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💻 Local First Dev
In the last couple decades, we’ve observed the success of SaaS web applications (Google Docs, Salesforce, Basecamp, Trello, etc.). These applications have unleashed collaboration using the web platform. Before this, users might have emailed…
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💬 The importance of effective communication
Recently, effective communication has been discussed. But let’s step back – why is communication so important? As developers, isn’t coding what we do? Think for a minute – how much time gets spent coding/designing vs. everything else? For m…
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💡 Reflections from AI-coding a 10,000 line app
Lessons from AI-coding a 10,000 line app BRun is getting usable. Claude Code wrote almost all of it using Doc-driven development (manually write/update the docs, and have Claude write the code). Some thoughts: Claude is fast – there is no …
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😊 Other ways to align the happy path
Yesterday, we discussed aligning the happy path in code. Are there other ways to align the “happy path”? (The happy path is the desired path where things are functioning as expected.) Some thoughts: Focus on your productive people - as a ma…
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📚 Documentation never has to go out of date again
AI is really good at updating documentation after implementation. While I strongly advocate writing the documentation to drive AI, inevitably, the implementation takes some unanticipated turns, so making sure everything is in sync after imp…
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📚 Keep documentation close to the design/code
I find it works best to keep documentation as close to the code or design files as possible. There are several benefits: You can update, commit, and review documentation as part of the standard working process (pull requests, CI, etc.) You…
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🔄 Close the loop with AI
There is a fascinating statement in a recent MIT study that claims 95% of organizations are getting zero return from GenAI investments. The core barrier to scaling is not infrastructure, regulation, or talent. It is learning. Most GenAI sy…
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🤖 AI is the new compiler
There are two ways to use AI: Start with a vague prompt and keep prompting until we get the result we want. Point the AI at documentation, and keep updating the documentation until it is clear enough that AI can do the right thing. Even t…
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✨ Anyone can write scripts now
With Claude Code (and likely many other AI technologies), anyone can write scripts now. Instead of writing in a technical language like Python or Bash, you can now write a sequence of commands with some rules in plain English, and Claude tr…
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✏️ Effective Communication (Sketching)
Sketching is kind of like writing cursive—it engages a dynamic in our brains that inspires creativity. As we mostly use computers, it takes extra effort to pick up pen or pencil, but surprising things happen when we do. It engages broader a…
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🎨 Effective Communication (Drawing)
We’ve already explored 4 modes of communication (audio, written, images, video). Drawings are another, and today it is even easier to do with tools like Excalidraw and Draw.io. It is easy to copy drawings from both into other applications. …
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📹 Effective Communication (Video)
Video is now an important way to communicate. The most obvious type is Zoom calls. But there are other ways we can use video such as screencasting, recording demos, etc. Position a decent camera at a good angle. Shooting up your nose probab…
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📸 Effective Communication (Images)
“A picture is worth a thousand words.” There are many times when a screenshot or a photograph can drastically improve the rate of communication. Therefore, figure out ways to do this efficiently. Make sure your computer system has an effic…
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🎧 Effective communication (Audio)
Effective communication requires that those receiving information from us can easily process it. I’ve been on way too many calls where you can barely hear the speaker due to echo, background noise, or other audio problems. Some things I’ve …
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🧑💻 How can we increase developer productivity?
“The way you get programmer productivity is not by increasing the lines of code per programmer per day. That doesn’t work. The way you get programmer productivity is by eliminating lines of code you have to write.The line of code that’s the…