Inserting a New Node

Traumatized by years of tech interviews, solving linked list questions on whiteboards, I have been anxious about expressing technical thoughts, scared to insert myself into the chain. It’s been years since my last standup, nearly two decades from my first startup. With time away from Big Tech, I have found a group of inventors, thinkers and creators that have inspired me to join the chat.

Here’s a chain that I quite enjoy: First, Simon Willison. Simon has a knack for coining phrases that reflect a bigger concern. He popularized the term “slop” a peer of “spam”, to describe unwanted AI garbage that nobody asked for and no one has vetted. He coined “prompt injection” to describe how attackers exploit AI’s hilarious and horrifying gullibility.

I’ve been very reluctant to let my fanboy flag fly, but with Simon, I had the pleasure of hanging out with him and experiencing a truly lovely person. He visited PyHawaii virtually and stayed late into his PST evening hanging out with me and a bunch of local HST nerds.

I’m a big fan of Simon’s TIL repo. In it, he points to Josh Branchaud, whose post on Hacker News inspired him to start “learning in public.”

Continuing down the chain, Josh attributes the “Learn in Public” philosophy to swyx, whose AI Engineer’s World’s Fair and Latent.Space podcast are essential for anyone trying to keep up with what’s happening to our craft.

Like Simon, like Josh, like swyx, I believe in learning in public. Making mistakes visible so we can all learn.

What’s Next

I’m planning to write about:

  • AI as a mirror, the horror and the insights
  • Useful tips and tricks for using AI, ethically and effectively
  • Lessons from building software, years after I’ve stopped being a good coder
  • A local Hawai’i perspective, my years outside the tech hub bubble

Git Out There

This blog is all orchestrated through Git commits. I’ve spent years as a coder, manager and director, cutting branches and detangling conflicts. Git feels like a natural place where I can overthink, mull over, overwrite, underommit, learn and fail and write and write and rebase. I’ve never been a linear guy, so I’ll explore the shape of my mental trees here on this gitty little blog I’m calling Git Out There. Let’s explore this strange new world together.