It’s Friday at 4pm. I’ve just closed my 12th bug of the week. My brain is completely fried. And I’m staring at the bug leaderboard, genuinely sad that Monday means going back to regular work. Which is weird because I love regular work. But fixit weeks have a special place in my heart. What’s a fixit, you ask? Once a quarter, my org with ~45 software engineers stops all regular work for a week. That means no roadmap work, no design work, no meetings or standups. Instead, we fix the small things that have been annoying us and our users:

an error message that’s been unclear for two years a weird glitch when the user scrolls and zooms at the same time a test which runs slower than it should, slowing down CI for everyone

The rules are simple: 1) no bug should take over 2 days and 2) all work should focus on either small end-user bugs/features or developer productivity.

I recently shipped a non-trivial Ghostty feature (unobtrusive macOS automatic updates) that was largely developed with AI.

In my last post I talked about how I spent a week heads down using AI to work on a greenfield engineering metrics tool. As I built it, I’d often navigate the web app and spot things that needed to be fleshed out. Sometimes it was a small typo; other times it was a bigger […]

Computers are starting to have opinions on how our APIs should look like

Create systems that allow you to be consistently productive

Explore GitHub’s top blogs of 2024, featuring new tools, AI breakthroughs, and tips to level up your developer game.

This may be overkill, but it works on my machine

A REST client for the Web

Software teams seeking to provide better products and services must focus on faster release cycles.

VS Code remote support for WSL, Containers, and SSH

Kubernetes for Prod, Tilt for Dev

If you’ve ever written any Python at all, the chances are you’ve used iterators without even realising it. Writing your own and using them in your programs can provide significant perfo…