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Irrational Exuberance

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Trying the Software factory pattern. One of the interesting challenges of the AI ecosystem in 2026 is that new, effective patterns emerge...
a week ago
3

Trying the Software factory pattern.

from Irrational Exuberance [alt+shift+b] in programming

a week ago
One of the interesting challenges of the AI ecosystem in 2026 is that new, effective patterns emerge faster than I can adopt them. I’ll find a handful, get back to work, and realize a month later that I’d missed four or five more. The adoption cycle for Imprint this year has been...
Middle management roles are also a trap. Six years ago, I wrote Tech Lead Management roles are a trap. My argument then was that TLM roles...
8th Aug 2026
2

Middle management roles are also a trap.

from Irrational Exuberance [alt+shift+b] in programming

8th Aug 2026
Six years ago, I wrote Tech Lead Management roles are a trap. My argument then was that TLM roles present themselves as easier than moving into a full management role, but the tension between doing the software engineering and engineering management aspects of the role made being...
Make no assumptions. I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the concept of “soil horizons”, which is the idea that there...
11th Jul 2026
0

Make no assumptions.

from Irrational Exuberance [alt+shift+b] in programming

11th Jul 2026
I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the concept of “soil horizons”, which is the idea that there are many distinct layers of soil, from topsoil all the way down to bedrock, which all combine into a soil horizon. Translating this idea into software, the ideal codebase would...
Revised rules of engineering leadership. From early 2014 through late 2020, I was working in hypergrowth environments, which are challenging,...
15th Jun 2026
1

Revised rules of engineering leadership.

from Irrational Exuberance [alt+shift+b] in programming

15th Jun 2026
From early 2014 through late 2020, I was working in hypergrowth environments, which are challenging, but also educational. The most valuable feature of hypergrowth is that your mistakes reveal themselves next month rather than next year, because things go wrong very loudly when...
Agents as scaffolding for recurring tasks. One of my gifts/curses is an endless fixation with how processes can be optimized. For a brief...
12th Apr 2026
1

Agents as scaffolding for recurring tasks.

from Irrational Exuberance [alt+shift+b] in programming

12th Apr 2026
One of my gifts/curses is an endless fixation with how processes can be optimized. For a brief moment early in my career, that was focused on improving how humans collaborate, but that quickly switched to figuring out how we can minimize human involvement, and...
Judgment and creativity are all you need. When I joined Imprint a little less than a year ago, our deploys were manual, requiring close human...
11th Mar 2026
1

Judgment and creativity are all you need.

from Irrational Exuberance [alt+shift+b] in programming

11th Mar 2026
When I joined Imprint a little less than a year ago, our deploys were manual, requiring close human attention to complete. Our database migrations were run manually, too. Developing good software is very possible in those circumstances, but it takes a remarkable attention to...
Refactoring internal documentation in Notion In our latest developer productivity survey, our documentation was the area with the second most...
5th Feb 2026
1

Refactoring internal documentation in Notion

from Irrational Exuberance [alt+shift+b] in programming

5th Feb 2026
In our latest developer productivity survey, our documentation was the area with the second most comments. This is a writeup of the concrete steps I took to see how much progress one person could make on improving the organization’s documentation while holding myself to a high...
Building an internal agent: Iterative prompt and skill refinement Some of our internal workflows are being used quite frequently, and usage reveals gaps in the...
1st Jan 2026
1

Building an internal agent: Iterative prompt and skill refinement

from Irrational Exuberance [alt+shift+b] in programming

1st Jan 2026
Some of our internal workflows are being used quite frequently, and usage reveals gaps in the current prompts, skills, and tools. Here is how we’re working to iterate on these internal workflows. This is part of the Building an internal agent series. Why does iterative refinement...
Facilitating AI adoption at Imprint I’ve been working on internal “AI” adoption, which is really LLM-tooling and agent adoption, for the...
7th Dec 2025
1

Facilitating AI adoption at Imprint

from Irrational Exuberance [alt+shift+b] in programming

7th Dec 2025
I’ve been working on internal “AI” adoption, which is really LLM-tooling and agent adoption, for the past 18 months or so. This is a problem that I think is, at minimum, a side-quest for every engineering leader in the current era. Given the sheer number of folks working on this...
Coding at work (after a decade away). Since joining Imprint a bit over six months ago as the CTO of a ~50 engineer team, I’ve merged 104...
19th Nov 2025
1

Coding at work (after a decade away).

from Irrational Exuberance [alt+shift+b] in programming

19th Nov 2025
Since joining Imprint a bit over six months ago as the CTO of a ~50 engineer team, I’ve merged 104 pull requests, which is slightly over four per week. Many of them are very minimal configuration and documentation tweaks, and none were the hardest or even most time-sensitive task...
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