When you're just getting started with music, you have so many skills to learn. You have to be able to play your instrument and express yourself through it. You need to know the style you're playing, and its idioms and conventions. You may want to record your music, and need all the skills that come along with it. Music is, mostly, subjective: there's not an objective right or wrong way to do things. And that can make it really hard! Each of these skills is then couched in this subjectivity of trying to see if it's good enough. Playing someone else's music, making a cover, is great because it can make it objective. It gives you something to check against. When you're playing your own music, you're in charge of the entire thing. You didn't play a wrong note, because, well, you've just changed the piece! But when you play someone else's music, now there's an original and you can try to get as close to it as possible. Recreating it gives you a lot of practice in figuring out what someone did and how they did it. It also lets you peek into why they did it. Maybe a particular chord voicing is hard for you to play. Okay, let's simplify it and play an easier voicing. How does it sound now? How does it sound with the harder one? Play around with those differences and you start to see the why behind it all. * * * The same thing holds true for programming. One of my friends is a C++ programmer[1] and he was telling me about how he learned C++ and data structures really well early on: He reimplemented parts of the Boost library. This code makes heavy use of templates, a hard thing in C++. And it provides fundamental data structures with robust implementations and good performance[2]. What he would do is look at the library and pick a slice of it to implement. He'd look at what the API for it is, how it was implemented, what it was doing under the hood. Then he'd go ahead and try to do it himself, without any copy-pasting and without real-time copying from the other screen. Sometimes, he'd run into things which didn't make sense. Why is this a doubly-linked list here, when it seems a singly-linked list would do just fine? And in those moments, if you can't find a reason? You get to go down that path, make it the singly-linked version, and then find out later: oh, ohhh. Ohhhh, they did that for a reason. It lets you run into some of the hard problems, grapple with them, and understand why the original was written how it was. You get to study with some really strong programmers, by proxy via their codebase. Their code is your tutor and your guide for understanding how to write similar things in the future. * * * There's a lot of judgment out there about doing original works. This kind of judgment of covers and of reimplementing things that already exist, just to learn. So many people have internalized this, and I've heard countless times "I want to make a new project, but everything I think of, someone else has already done!" And to that, I say: do it anyway[3]. If someone else has done it, that's great. That means that you had an idea so good that someone else thought it was a good idea, too. And that means that, because someone else has done it, you have a reference now. You can compare notes, and you can see how they did it, and you can learn. I'm a recovering C++ programmer myself, and had some unpleasant experiences associated with the language. This friend is a game developer, and his industry is one where C++ makes a lot of sense to use because of the built-up code around it. ↩ He said they're not perfect, but that they're really good and solid and you know a lot of people thought for a long time about how to do them. You get to follow in their footsteps and benefit from all that hard thinking time. ↩ But: you must always give credit when you are using someone else's work. If you're reimplementing someone else's library, or covering someone's song, don't claim it's your own original invention. ↩

One of my side quests at work is to get a simple feedback loop going where we can create knowledge bases that comment on Notion documents. I was curious if I could hook this together following these requirements: No custom code hosting Prompt is editable within Notion rather than requiring understanding of Zapier Should be be fairly quickly Ultimately, I was able to get it working. So a quick summary of how it works, some comments on why I don’t particularly like this approach, then some more detailed comments on getting it working. General approach Create a Notion database of prompts. Create a specific prompt for providing feedback on RFCs. Create a Notion database for all RFCs. Add an automation into this database that calls a Zapier webhook. The Zapier webhook does a variety of things that culminate in using the RFC prompt to provide feedback on the specific RFC as a top-level comment in the RFC. Altogether this works fairly well. The challenges with this approach The best thing about this approach is that it actually works, and it works fairly well. However, as we dig into the implementation details, you’ll also see that a series of things are unnaturally difficult with Zapier: Managing rich text in Notion because it requires navigating the blocks datastructure Allowing looping API constructs such as making it straightforward to leave multiple comments on specific blocks rather than a single top-level comment Notion only allows up to 2,000 characters per block, but chunking into multiple blocks is moderately unnatural. In a true Python environment, it would be trivial to translate to and from Markdown using something like md2notion Ultimately, I could only recommend this approach as an initial validation. It’s definitely not the right long-term resting place for this kind of approach. Zapier implementation I already covered the Notion side of the integration, so let’s dig into the Zapier pieces a bit. Overall it had eight steps. I’ve skipped the first step, which was just a default webhook receiver. The second step was retrieving a statically defined Notion page containing the prompt. (In later steps I just use the Notion API directly, which I would do here if I was redoing this, but this worked too. The advantage of the API is that it returns a real JSON object, this doesn’t, probably because I didn’t specify the content-type header or some such.) This is the configuration page of step 2, where I specify the prompt’s page explicitly. ) Probably because I didn’t set content-type, I think I was getting post formatted data here, so I just regular expressed the data out. It’s a bit sloppy, but hey it worked, so there’s that. ) Here is using the Notion API request tool to retrieve the updated RFC (as opposed to the prompt which we already retrieved). ) The API request returns a JSON object that you can navigate without writing regular expressions, so that’s nice. ) Then we send both the prompt as system instructions and the RFC as the user message to Open AI. ) Then pass the response from OpenAI to json.dumps to encode it for being included in an API call. This is mostly solving for newlines being \n rather than literal newlines. ) Then format the response into an API request to add a comment to the document. Anyway, this wasn’t beautiful, and I think you could do a much better job by just doing all of this in Python, but it’s a workable proof of concept.

When working on big JavaScript web apps, you can split the bundle in multiple chunks and import selected chunks lazily, only when needed. That makes the main bundle smaller, faster to load and parse. How to lazy import a module? let hljs = await import("highlight.js").default; is equivalent of: import hljs from "highlight.js"; Now:   let libZip = await import("@zip.js/zip.js");   let blobReader = new libZip.BlobReader(blob); Is equivalent to: import { BlobReader } from "@zip.js/zip.js"; It’s simple if we call it from async function but sometimes we want to lazy load from non-async function so things might get more complicated: let isLazyImportng = false; let hljs; let markdownIt; let markdownItAnchor; async function lazyImports() { if (isLazyImportng) return; isLazyImportng = true; let promises = await Promise.all([ import("highlight.js"), import("markdown-it"), import("markdown-it-anchor"), ]); hljs = promises[0].default; markdownIt = promises[1].default; markdownItAnchor = promises[2].default; } We can run it from non-async function: function doit() { lazyImports().then( () => { if (hljs) { // use hljs to do something } }) } I’ve included protection against kicking of lazy import more than once. That means on second and n-th call we might not yet have the module loaded so hljs will be still undefined.

A step-by-step walkthrough of the toy kill program using raw Linux syscalls.

For managers who have spent a long time reporting to a specific leader or working in an organization with well‑understood goals, it’s easy to develop skill gaps without realizing it. Usually this happens because those skills were not particularly important in the environment you grew up in. You may become extremely confident in your existing skills, enter a new organization that requires a different mix of competencies, and promptly fall on your face. There are a few common varieties of this, but the one I want to discuss here is when managers grow up in an organization that operates from top‑down plans (“orchestration‑heavy roles”) and then find themselves in a sufficiently senior role, or in a bottom‑up organization, that expects them to lead rather than orchestrate (“leadership‑heavy roles”). Orchestration versus leadership You can break the components of solving a problem down in a number of ways, and I’m not saying this is the perfect way to do it, but here are six important components of directing a team’s work: Problem discovery: Identifying which problems to work on Problem selection: Aligning with your stakeholders on the problems you’ve identified Solution discovery: Identifying potential solutions to the selected problem Solution selection: Aligning with your stakeholders on the approach you’ve chosen Execution: Implementing the selected solution Ongoing revision: Keeping your team and stakeholders aligned as you evolve the plan In an orchestration‑heavy management role, you might focus only on the second half of these steps. In a leadership‑heavy management role, you work on all six steps. Folks who’ve only worked in orchestration-heavy roles often have no idea that they are expected to perform all of these. So, yes, there’s a skill gap in performing the work, but more importantly there’s an awareness gap that the work actually exists to be done. Here are a few ways you can identify an orchestration‑heavy manager that doesn’t quite understand their current, leadership‑heavy circumstances: Focuses on prioritization as “solution of first resort.” When you’re not allowed to change the problem or the approach, prioritization becomes one of the best tools you have. Accepts problems and solutions as presented. If a stakeholder asks for something, questions are around priority rather than whether the project makes sense to do at all, or suggestions of alternative approaches. There’s no habit of questioning whether the request makes sense—that’s left to the stakeholder or to more senior functional leadership. Focuses on sprint planning and process. With the problem and approach fixed, protecting your team from interruption and disruption is one of your most valuable tools. Operating strictly to a sprint cadence (changing plans only at the start of each sprint) is a powerful technique. All of these things are still valuable in a leadership‑heavy role, but they just aren’t necessarily the most valuable things you could be doing. Operating in a leadership-heavy role There is a steep learning curve for managers who find themselves in a leadership‑heavy role, because it’s a much more expansive role. However, it’s important to realize that there are no senior engineering leadership roles focused solely on orchestration. You either learn this leadership style or you get stuck in mid‑level roles (even in organizations that lean orchestration-heavy). Further, the technology industry generally believes it overinvested in orchestration‑heavy roles in the 2010s. Consequently, companies are eliminating many of those roles and preventing similar roles from being created in the next generation of firms. There’s a pervasive narrative attributing this shift to the increased productivity brought by LLMs, but I’m skeptical of that relationship—this change was already underway before LLMs became prominent. My advice for folks working through the leadership‑heavy role learning curve is: Think of your job’s core loop as four steps: Identify the problems your team should be working on Decide on a destination that solves those problems Explain to your team, stakeholders, and executives the path the team will follow to reach that destination Communicate both data and narratives that provide evidence you’re walking that path successfully If you are not doing these four things, you are not performing your full role, even if people say you do some parts well. Similarly, if you want to get promoted or secure more headcount, those four steps are the path to doing so (I previously discussed this in How to get more headcount). Ask your team for priorities and problems to solve. Mining for bottom‑up projects is a critical part of your role. If you wait only for top‑down and lateral priorities, you aren’t performing the first step of the core loop. It’s easy to miss this expectation—it’s invisible to you but obvious to everyone else, so they don’t realize it needs to be said. If you’re not sure, ask. If your leadership chain is running the core loop for your team, it’s because they lack evidence that you can run it yourself. That’s a bad sign. What’s “business as usual” in an orchestration‑heavy role actually signals a struggling manager in a leadership‑heavy role. Get your projects prioritized by following the core loop. If you have a major problem on your team and wonder why it isn’t getting solved, that’s on you. Leadership‑heavy roles won’t have someone else telling you how to frame your team’s work—unless they think you’re doing a bad job. Picking the right problems and solutions is your highest‑leverage work. No, this is not only your product manager’s job or your tech lead’s—it is your job. It’s also theirs, but leadership overlaps because getting it right is so valuable. Generalizing a bit, your focus now is effectiveness of your team’s work, not efficiency in implementing it. Moving quickly on the wrong problem has no value. Understand your domain and technology in detail. You don’t have to write all the software—but you should have written some simple pull requests to verify you can reason about the codebase. You don’t have to author every product requirement or architecture proposal, but you should write one occasionally to prove you understand the work. If you don’t feel capable of that, that’s okay. But you need to urgently write down steps you’ll take to close that gap and share that plan with your team and manager. They currently see you as not meeting expectations and want to know how you’ll start meeting them. If you think that gap cannot be closed or that it’s unreasonable to expect you to close it, you misunderstand your role. Some organizations will allow you to misunderstand your role for a long time, provided you perform parts of it well, but they rarely promote you under those circumstances—and most won’t tolerate it for senior leaders. Align with your team and cross‑functional stakeholders as much as you align with your executive. If your executive is wrong and you follow them, it is your fault that your team and stakeholders are upset: part of your job is changing your executive’s mind. Yes, it can feel unfair if you’re the type to blame everything on your executive. But it’s still true: expecting your executive to get everything right is a sure way to feel superior without accomplishing much. Now that I’ve shared my perspective, I admit I’m being a bit extreme on purpose—people who don’t pick up on this tend to dispute its validity strongly unless there is no room to debate. There is room for nuance, but if you think my entire point is invalid, I encourage you to have a direct conversation with your manager and team about their expectations and how they feel you’re meeting them.