I’m Noah, a software architect in Austin, TX. I write about code, event modeling, API design, agentic systems, and adventures in chess.
At my day job I enjoy building cool things with my hundreds of friends at Chess.com.
Say hello, follow my open source, or play me in chess sometime.
8 years ago at SRCCON Simon Willison convinced me everyone should blog, and I’m just now getting my rear in gear. Do cool things and talk about them. Not the one without the other.
What is your philosophy of code? That’s a question I’ve asked on both sides of a lot of interviews. Everyone can point to specific qualities in their code that have contributed to success or failure and talking about them reveals which ones are most valuable to individuals and teams and which ones they have never even thought about. Often though, the answers to this question paint an astonishing double rainbow of shame around the many ways we harm ourselves and our projects with our coding practices, even when individuals know the good ones. And they almost always do! As teams, we just don’t think about it that hard. ...
Stu Halloway was recently a guest on the Cognicast where the conversation turned to process and ideas. The following quote from that conversation caught my attention: Pull Requests is the tail wagging the dog, it says that the workflow is about code. It’s not. The workflow is about ideas. The workflow is about conversations between people. Stu is referring here to the Clojure contribution process but to me, the idea invites a broader application. He clarified that this process is not anti-code, but pro-idea: ...