One of life's greatest simple pleasures is creating something just for yourself.

One of the recurring challenges in any organization is how to split your attention across long-term and short-term problems. Your software might be struggling to scale with ramping user load while also knowing that you have a series of meaningful security vulnerabilities that need to be closed sooner than later. How do you balance across them? These sorts of balance questions occur at every level of an organization. A particularly frequent format is the debate between Product and Engineering about how much time goes towards developing new functionality versus improving what’s already been implemented. In 2020, Calm was growing rapidly as we navigated the COVID-19 pandemic, and the team was struggling to make improvements, as they felt saturated by incoming new requests. This strategy for resourcing Engineering-driven projects was our attempt to solve that problem. This is an exploratory, draft chapter for a book on engineering strategy that I’m brainstorming in #eng-strategy-book. As such, some of the links go to other draft chapters, both published drafts and very early, unpublished drafts. Reading this document To apply this strategy, start at the top with Policy. To understand the thinking behind this strategy, read sections in reverse order, starting with Explore. More detail on this structure in Making a readable Engineering Strategy document. Policy & Operation Our policies for resourcing Engineering-driven projects are: We will protect one Eng-driven project per product engineering team, per quarter. These projects should represent a maximum of 20% of the team’s bandwidth. Each project must advance a measurable metric, and execution must be designed to show progress on that metric within 4 weeks. These projects must adhere to Calm’s existing Engineering strategies. We resource these projects first in the team’s planning, rather than last. However, only concrete projects are resourced. If there’s no concrete proposal, then the team won’t have time budgeted for Engineering-driven work. Team’s engineering manager is responsible for deciding on the project, ensuring the project is valuable, and pushing back on attempts to defund the project. Project selection does not require CTO approval, but you should escalate to the CTO if there’s friction or disagreement. CTO will review Engineering-driven projects each quarter to summarize their impact and provide feedback to teams’ engineering managers on project selection and execution. They will also review teams that did not perform a project to understand why not. As we’ve communicated this strategy, we’ve frequently gotten conceptual alignment that this sounds reasonable, coupled with uncertainty about what sort of projects should actually be selected. At some level, this ambiguity is an acknowledgment that we believe teams will identify the best opportunities bottoms-up, we also wanted to give two concrete examples of projects we’re greenlighting in the first batch: Code-free media release: historically, we’ve needed to make a number of pull requests to add, organize, and release new pieces of media. This is high urgency work, but Engineering doesn’t exercise much judgment while doing it, and manual steps often create errors. We aim to track and eliminate these pull requests, while also increasing the number of releases that can be facilitated without scaling the content release team. Machine-learning content placement: developing new pieces of media is often a multi-week or month process. After content is ready to release, there’s generally a debate on where to place the content. This matters for the company, as this drives engagement with our users, but it matters even more to the content creator, who is generally evaluated in terms of their content’s performance. This often leads to Product and Engineering getting caught up in debates about how to surface particular pieces of content. This project aims to improve user engagement by surfacing the best content for their interests, while also giving the Content team several explicit positions to highlight content without Product and Engineering involvement. Although these projects are similar, it’s not intended that all Engineering-driven projects are of this variety. Instead it’s happenstance based on what the teams view as their biggest opportunities today. Diagnosis Our assessment of the current situation at Calm is: We are spending a high percentage of our time on urgent but low engineering value tasks. Most significantly, about one-third of our time is going into launching, debugging, and changing content that we release into our product. Engineering is involved due to limitations in our implementation, not because there is any inherent value in Engineering’s involvement. (We mostly just make releases slowly and inadvertently introduce bugs of our own.) We have a bunch of fairly clear ideas around improving the platform to empower the Content team to speed up releases, and to eliminate the Engineering involvement. However, we’ve struggled to find time to implement them, or to validate that these ideas will work. If we don’t find a way to prioritize, and succeed at implementing, a project to reduce Engineering involvement in Content releases, we will struggle to support our goals to release more content and to develop more product functionality this year Our Infrastructure team has been able to plan and make these kinds of investments stick. However, when we attempt these projects within our Product Engineering teams, things don’t go that well. We are good at getting them onto the initial roadmap, but then they get deprioritized due to pressure to complete other projects. Engineering team is not very fungible due to its small size (20 engineers), and because we have many specializations within the team: iOS, Android, Backend, Frontend, Infrastructure, and QA. We would like to staff these kinds of projects onto the Infrastructure team, but in practice that team does not have the product development experience to implement theis kind of project. We’ve discussed spinning up a Platform team, or moving product engineers onto Infrastructure, but that would either (1) break our goal to maintain joint pairs between Product Managers and Engineering Managers, or (2) be indistinguishable from prioritizing within the existing team because it would still have the same Product Manager and Engineering Manager pair. Company planning is organic, occurring in many discussions and limited structured process. If we make a decision to invest in one project, it’s easy for that project to get deprioritized in a side discussion missing context on why the project is important. These reprioritization discussions happen both in executive forums and in team-specific forums. There’s imperfect awareness across these two sorts of forums. Explore Prioritization is a deep topic with a wide variety of popular solutions. For example, many software companies rely on “RICE” scoring, calculating priority as (Reach times Impact times Confidence) divided by Effort. At the other extreme are complex methodologies like [Scaled Agile Framework)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_agile_framework). In addition to generalized planning solutions, many companies carve out special mechanisms to solve for particular prioritization gaps. Google historically offered 20% time to allow individuals to work on experimental projects that didn’t align directly with top-down priorities. Stripe’s Foundation Engineering organization developed the concept of Foundational Initiatives to prioritize cross-pillar projects with long-term implications, which otherwise struggled to get prioritized within the team-led planning process. All these methods have clear examples of succeeding, and equally clear examples of struggling. Where these initiatives have succeeded, they had an engaged executive sponsoring the practice’s rollout, including triaging escalations when the rollout inconvenienced supporters of the prior method. Where they lacked a sponsor, or were misaligned with the company’s culture, these methods have consistently failed despite the fact that they’ve previously succeeded elsewhere.

I used to make little applications just for myself. Sixteen years ago (oof) I wrote a habit tracking application, and a keylogger that let me keep track of when I was using a computer, and generate some pretty charts. I’ve taken a long break from those kinds of things. I love my hobbies, but they’ve drifted toward the non-technical, and the idea of keeping a server online for a fun project is unappealing (which is something that I hope Val Town, where I work, fixes). Some folks maintain whole ‘homelab’ setups and run Kubernetes in their basement. Not me, at least for now. But I have been tiptoeing back into some little custom tools that only I use, with a focus on just my own computing experience. Here’s a quick tour. Hammerspoon Hammerspoon is an extremely powerful scripting tool for macOS that lets you write custom keyboard shortcuts, UIs, and more with the very friendly little language Lua. Right now my Hammerspoon configuration is very simple, but I think I’ll use it for a lot more as time progresses. Here it is: hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "shift"}, "return", function() local frontmost = hs.application.frontmostApplication() if frontmost:name() == "Ghostty" then frontmost:hide() else hs.application.launchOrFocus("Ghostty") end end) Not much! But I recently switched to Ghostty as my terminal, and I heavily relied on iTerm2’s global show/hide shortcut. Ghostty doesn’t have an equivalent, and Mikael Henriksson suggested a script like this in GitHub discussions, so I ran with it. Hammerspoon can do practically anything, so it’ll probably be useful for other stuff too. SwiftBar I review a lot of PRs these days. I wanted an easy way to see how many were in my review queue and go to them quickly. So, this script runs with SwiftBar, which is a flexible way to put any script’s output into your menu bar. It uses the GitHub CLI to list the issues, and jq to massage that output into a friendly list of issues, which I can click on to go directly to the issue on GitHub. #!/bin/bash # <xbar.title>GitHub PR Reviews</xbar.title> # <xbar.version>v0.0</xbar.version> # <xbar.author>Tom MacWright</xbar.author> # <xbar.author.github>tmcw</xbar.author.github> # <xbar.desc>Displays PRs that you need to review</xbar.desc> # <xbar.image></xbar.image> # <xbar.dependencies>Bash GNU AWK</xbar.dependencies> # <xbar.abouturl></xbar.abouturl> DATA=$(gh search prs --state=open -R val-town/val.town --review-requested=@me --json url,title,number,author) echo "$(echo "$DATA" | jq 'length') PR" echo '---' echo "$DATA" | jq -c '.[]' | while IFS= read -r pr; do TITLE=$(echo "$pr" | jq -r '.title') AUTHOR=$(echo "$pr" | jq -r '.author.login') URL=$(echo "$pr" | jq -r '.url') echo "$TITLE ($AUTHOR) | href=$URL" done Tampermonkey Tampermonkey is essentially a twist on Greasemonkey: both let you run your own JavaScript on anybody’s webpage. Sidenote: Greasemonkey was created by Aaron Boodman, who went on to write Replicache, which I used in Placemark, and is now working on Zero, the successor to Replicache. Anyway, I have a few fancy credit cards which have ‘offers’ which only work if you ‘activate’ them. This is an annoying dark pattern! And there’s a solution to it - CardPointers - but I neither spend enough nor care enough about points hacking to justify the cost. Plus, I’d like to know what code is running on my bank website. So, Tampermonkey to the rescue! I wrote userscripts for Chase, American Express, and Citi. You can check them out on this Gist but I strongly recommend to read through all the code because of the afore-mentioned risks around running untrusted code on your bank account’s website! Obsidian Freeform This is a plugin for Obsidian, the notetaking tool that I use every day. Freeform is pretty cool, if I can say so myself (I wrote it), but could be much better. The development experience is lackluster because you can’t preview output at the same time as writing code: you have to toggle between the two states. I’ll fix that eventually, or perhaps Obsidian will add new API that makes it all work. I use Freeform for a lot of private health & financial data, almost always with an Observable Plot visualization as an eventual output. For example, when I was switching banks and one of the considerations was mortgage discounts in case I ever buy a house (ha 😢), it was fun to chart out the % discounts versus the required AUM. It’s been really nice to have this kind of visualization as ‘just another document’ in my notetaking app. Doesn’t need another server, and Obsidian is pretty secure and private.

At a conference a while back, I noticed a couple of speakers get such a confidence boost after solving a small technical glitch. We should probably make that a part of every talk. Have the mic not connect automatically, or an almost-complete puzzle on the stage that the speaker can finish, or have someone forget their badge and the speaker return it to them. Maybe the next time I, or a consenting teammate, have to give a presentation I’ll try to engineer such a situation. All conference talks should start with a small technical glitch that the speaker can easily solve was originally published by Ognjen Regoje at Ognjen Regoje • ognjen.io on April 03, 2025.

A large part of our civilisation rests on the shoulders of one medieval monk: Thomas Aquinas. Amid the turmoil of life, riddled with wickedness and pain, he would insist that our world is good.  And all our success is built on this belief. Note: Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: Thomas Aquinas is clearly a Christian thinker, a Saint even. Yet he was also a brilliant philosopher. So even if you consider yourself agnostic or an atheist, stay with me, you will still enjoy his ideas. What is good? Thomas’ argument is rooted in Aristotle’s concept of goodness: Something is good if it fulfills its function. Aristotle had illustrated this idea with a knife. A knife is good to the extent that it cuts well. He made a distinction between an actual knife and its ideal function. That actual thing in your drawer is the existence of a knife. And its ideal function is its essence—what it means to be a knife: to cut well.  So everything is separated into its existence and its ideal essence. And this is also true for humans: We have an ideal conception of what the essence of a human […] The post Thomas Aquinas — The world is divine! appeared first on Ralph Ammer.