My blog. Personal thoughts, anecdotes, and musings.
My biggest frustration with modern docs is that much of the industry standardized on Markdown.
And Markdown isn’t semantic. A keyword, a term, a “first use” item all don’t exist. You mix presentation with meaning rather than separating.
XML for docs wasn’t fun but it was structured. You could denote terms. You could have actual admonitions.
And so the solution seems to be hacks that turn Markdown k to structured docs, embedded HTML spans with classes, and….
Networking and referrals land you jobs because AI is screening you out of the application pile.
New Book
Published March 8, 2025
I started writing a new book. It’ll be short. But it’ll be hands-on.
I’m writing it because this is the third time I’m implementing the topic, and I’m tired of writing the same explanations. I want a book to point at.
I’m no stranger to this. There are docs for lots of things, but reference docs only tell a part of the story. People need a golden path. And I’m good at providing that.
December 18th, 2024 was my last day at Temporal Technologies.
You Own It
Published December 9, 2024
I keep seeing how “LLMs are great teaching tools! I asked it to explain X to me and it did!”
Don’t be fooled!
Ask it to explain a technical topic you deeply understand and you’ll start to see where it makes things up.
It is a predictive text engine. Sure, you can do all sorts of prompt hacking to get better results. But at the end of the day, if you don’t know the topic really well you will never know if it made up the facts it gave you.
Software development doesn’t have to be your career. Use it to solve pain points in your life, like the one I had today.
I started out the year thinking it would be “business as usual.” Boy was I wrong.
I’ve been at Temporal for a full year. So, how’d it go?
You may have heard of learning styles. But it turns out there’s no evidence to support them.
A look back on my time at DigitalOcean as I close the books on nearly six years at this great company.