Jennifer++

Artificial Intelligence

What is a token

AI is meant to seem like magic. But there's no such thing as magic. It's all illusion. So, allow me to spoil that illusion for you.

Artificial Intelligence

Reviewing "How AI Impacts Skill Formation"

It's a weak study, but it still has interesting findings

Personal

I want to go home

I wrote this 7 years ago, a week or two before I started hormone replacement therapy. I shared it with a few people at the time, but never really published it anywhere. I really should have. Homesick Did you ever go to summer camp, or even just a sleepover at

Engineering

Gresham's law of programming

Or, bad code drives out good

C#

Test using OpenTelemetry traces in Asp.Net

Taking advantage of our OpenTelemetry tracing to easily test behavior that is otherwise very hard to observe

Sociotechnical systems

The free software commons

Free and open source software has become a modern commons, but now it's vulnerable. Freedom isn't sufficient to secure it for the future.

Letterbook

Letterbook - No universal translators

It turns out that federating is really hard. But, I managed it. Now I would love to have your help with everything that comes after that.

Letterbook Featured

Letterbook

We build tools, but we are also shaped by the affordances of those tools. I'm building Letterbook. I would like it if you join me.

Sociotechnical systems

Mental maps, part 2: incidents and observability

We map the system so that we can change the system, so then we must remap the system. That's the tight inner loop of software development.

Sociotechnical systems

Complex vs complicated

A quick and practical summary of what it means for a system to be complex, or not.

Sociotechnical systems

Mental maps for navigating software systems

Learning and exploration in complex systems happens continuously, forever. We need to constantly update our mental maps, or they'll lead us astray

Artificial Intelligence Featured

Losing the imitation game

AI cannot develop software for you, but that's not going to stop people from trying to make it happen anyway. And that is going to turn all of the easy software development problems into hard problems.

DevOps

Automate Thyself

For quite some time, my own ops haven't had much dev in them. But I'm changing that.

Advent of Code in Production

Advent of Code in Production, Day 13: Observability

At this point we've designed a system and we're going to provide it as a service. To operate that service effectively we have to understand how its behaving. That's all about observability.

Advent of Code in Production

Advent of Code in Production, Day 7: Incident Review

If Advent of Code was a whole system, it might look like this. Of course, the first deployment of a complex system is never smooth. This is a review of that incident.

Advent of Code in Production

Advent of Code in Production, Day 6: Operating Environment

Let's talk distributed systems! Getting into the details of how we could build a whole system to support Santa's elves, instead of a bunch of scripts.

Advent of Code in Production

Advent of Code in Production, Days 2-4: Early Development

Continuing my attempt to design a cohesive system that can address the challenges faced by Santa's Elves as they collect magical star fruit.

Advent of Code in Production

Advent of Code in Production, Day 1: Project Kickoff

Explore how you might approach building the solutions to Advent of Code challenges as a production service that you intend to operate long term, rather than as a collection of one-off scripts.

Engineering

Dimensions of Scalability

We are part of the systems we build. When those systems scale, that includes us. The approach we take will determine how successful and how painful that scaling will be.

Engineering

Named Things

This is a cautionary tale. It's the story of an internal tool development project. We'll call it Astro, because naming things is hard, and the reasons why are very instructive.

Interviewing

Culture Fit

We don't evaluate candidates purely on skill. We also assess them socially. I'll explore how to do that, without falling into the trap of dismissing someone as "not a culture fit" due to bias.

Interviewing

Interviewing Software Engineers

Artificial white board programming tests are the wrong thing, but they're easy to assign. Doing the right thing is going to be harder. So what we really need to do is identify what we're looking for in a programmer

Interviewing

Questions for your interviewer

As a candidate, interviews are your chance to learn how the team works, and how the company views and treats their employees. But after enduring your own interview, it's hard to know what to ask or how to evaluate the answers. This should help.

Talks

A Guide to using GitHub for Hacktoberfest

If you want to participate in Hacktoberfest, but you don't have much experience with GitHub, then you've come to the right place.

C#

FizzBuzz? Really?

Yes, it's FizzBuzz, but without the modulo! Exploring FizzBuzz as an interview exercise, and implemented like the children's counting game that inspired it.