Movie Making Day - Kids Intro to Brainstorming and Collaboration I had 4 kids, my 8, 6, and another 9, and 7 together to do a Movie Making Day last weekend. I had asked Claude to build a Worksheet - Write a Story (Hero, Goal, Problem), Scenes, Script, Editing, and we worked through it. Kids had fun but it was a
Marginal Attention Value At the end of every command, Claude will suggest another. A small fix, something missing, an improvement, instrumentation or alerting and more. Something if it doesn't, I'll also ask it, what else did you notice and anything to cleanup before we close? Each of these suggestions
Promoting your Agents As a manager, a lot of my team was spent on getting people promoted. Getting the right project, right visibility, right timing. The other half was making it clear to each team member, what does operating at the next level look like. When it comes to AI, I think a
Dash Dash Strict I recently got a new vacuum cleaner and was shocked at how much it picked up. I had thought that Roomba + Dyson + Cleaners coming regularly would leave nothing left, but so much was still picked up. It’s a similar shock, when revisiting code generated by AI. The shock, and
Practice Mode This new "practice" has been very helpful for me recently, /practice-mode In practice mode, I ask AI to write the code (or complete a task), but to do it in practice mode. In this mode, it has specific instructions like, dont deploy to prod, test it on
Two Steps Back / Three Angles of Attack So much of success at work as a dev, lies more in having AI solve problems for you and less in having you solving problems with AI. I met a friend today - new hire to a company, having a hard time with setting up his machine. And in discussing how
Agent Loyalty / Voldemort's Wand In the world of Harry Potter - a most powerful wizard could wield a most powerful wand, but could not use it effectively. Despite the Elder Wand's power, the wand was not loyal to Voldemort, and failed him. The agentic systems we have today are babies. Sure, lots and
My Community OS with AI It's all about the follow up. When managing volunteering/community events, things get dropped all the time. We're all volunteers, have many other responsibilities. We over-commit. We forget. I still drop things, but AI has made it huge impact on my ability to mobilize my
Mistakes in AI Mistake Management That regex was so stupid - my cousin's email was misclassified!! No one ever says that - Regular expressions - yucky to many, people would hate to write it, hate to read it even more, but you would never call a regex stupid. I hear all the time though - Claude was
Mocktail Mixer I followed a guide for hosting a 2 hour cocktail party. I loved the idea. It was light weight both in panning and execution, and other than dealing social anxiety around rejection and judgement, everything was straight forward. As a host, keeping track of time was a bit demanding, but
Getting Unstuck: Learnings from Restarting the Computer My car was stuck, it wouldn't start due to some error message. AAA ended up unplugging the battery, waiting for 10 minutes, and plugging it back in. The error message disappeared, and my car started! The story is so common - but why is it that restarting the computer
Append Only From wikipedia : Append-only is a property of computer data storage such that new data can be appended to the storage, but where existing data is immutable. Implementing an append-only data structure has many benefits, such as ensuring data consistency, improving performance,[6] and permitting rollbacks.[7][8] For
GarbageCollector.collect() What's on your mind for Thanksgiving Ibrahim? This Thanksgiving, I did the usual excessive eating on Thanksgiving, with 2 weeks of salad. The difference this year being, I ate the salad two weeks before Thanksgiving. There was no debt to be paid, it was paid for in advance.
Read / Write Ratio Ibrahim, why don't you write more? In distributed systems, you need to carefully optimize for reads or writes based on the expected usage of the system. Is there a lot of updates, and data coming in with only sporadic reads, or mostly stables content with lots and lots
Breakpoints So Ibrahim, how was your weekend? Stop everything, every thread, freeze all values. When things get confusing, programmers add breakpoints in the code, hook up a debugger, and force everything to stop. Commands run one at a time. Every assumption is checked, every variable poked at. Is that boolean really
Version++ So Ibrahim, do you have anything new to offer? Our understanding of "new version" is all wrong. In general, "new version" means a better something. A better iPhone, a better Windows, Web 3.0. Even Covid has versions, B.1.617. 2 > Delta CEO calling
While hasNext(), Iterator.next() But Ibrahim, shouldn't you only keep writing if you're good at it? Another iteration, another cycle, another loop, another day, another week, another post. Loops are magical, they transition so smoothly from an ending to a beginning. The CPU has an instruction cycle [https://en.wikipedia.
Unit Tests are the First Consumers of Any Public API But Ibrahim, who will read what you write? * This is not the code * This is not the interface * This is not the pseudocode This is the steel thread to confirm that things are working. That we have storage, compute and network. Behind every cute/innocent looking Hello World, is a
