Software engineering, book notes & ideas

Personal notes on Annie Duke’s How to Decide: outcome bias, decision trees, premortems, and connections to learning from uncertain outcomes.

Lessons simplifying a persistence API with Find and Upsert, including a GraphQL job-requisition example and the limits of mapping everything to CRUD.

Reflections on how language quirks shape software: Go code generation, JavaScript dependencies, CSS shorthand, and Python context managers.

Explore the Liskov Substitution Principle in Go through small interfaces, storage contracts, and functional options, with examples from real systems.

Notes on Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference: tactical empathy, labeling emotions, calibrated questions, and the Ackerman bargaining model.

How discussing semantic versioning can reveal an engineer’s approach to API design, backward compatibility, and Hyrum’s Law during interviews.

Practical software documentation lessons: prevent stale docs, reduce documentation debt, write for readers, and measure whether your docs help.

A personal reflection on seeing old friends succeed, comparing different paths through life, and the tension between motivation and self-doubt.

A developer’s notes on Programming Beyond Practices by Gregory T. Brown, focusing on exploratory programming, prototypes, and shared understanding.

Notes on Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein: choice architecture, default options, cognitive biases, and practical self-control strategies.

Notes on Edgar Schein’s Humble Inquiry: here-and-now humility, the ORJI cycle, and building trust through better questions and communication.

Why clarity matters at the start of a project: reflections on defining terms, goals, and assumptions through fear-setting and design sprints.

Recreating a colorful header graphic with SVG and D3.js: layered paths, rounded corners, varying opacity, and Gaussian noise, with a live demo.