Posts on Notes from prod

Thinking about Data: Canonical vs. Derived

Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article is part of a series of (ideas for) articles where I muse about a different facet of how one can look at data from a software engineer’s perspective.

We can talk about what it is, but that isn’t as much fun as poking and prodding the concept(s) until we come out with some pseudo-philosphical, not-really-poignent, and probably not completely correct proposition when framing data in this light.

Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way:

Surface level thinking is in the shitter

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hypothesis:

LLMs are driving us to only use surface-level thinking, and this will lead to a decline in all future opportunities.

Editorial:

I’m worried about how I think, specifically the “depth” of my thinking. I don’t track how “deep” I think regularly, nor do I have any objective tools that I could use for metrics. The only tool I have is my gut, which is more-or-less unreliable, but for the lack of tools, I’ll use it.

The Staff Engineers Path Post Mortem

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I found Tanya Reilly’s book validating. I came into Software Engineering as a career switcher from a completely unrelated field, but I spent years in operations management. Most likely due to my ADHD, I thrived in high-stakes, chaotic environments that required a lot of coordination and “synergy” (a word I think sucks, but for lack of a better term it’s good enough) between people to be successful. You could try to do it alone, but you’d most likely fail. Coordinating group effort is hard. Really hard. Sometimes it feels like baby sitting, sometimes it feels like you’re fighting each other even though you’re on the same side. And sometimes it felt like you were walking through your own Dante’s Inferno. Throughout that journey I learned a lot of soft skills around people management, leadership, and communication (it was exhausting). When I took a leap of faith in software engineering, I threw those soft skills in the trunk and focused on gaining technical skills to prove that I was worth keeping. This world was new to me, and I was surrounded by people who honestly lacked a lot of social skills, so I didn’t feel the need to whip out all of my tools I gained from previous experience. Since I came from a non-traditional background, I felt I didn’t belong. So I put my head down and pushed myself to improve technically to feel less like an imposter.