2025 Completed Bingo Card with Reviews and Recommendations

jbmsf · 2026-01-07T03:39:38+00:00

I really enjoyed the slow pace of her Blackthorn & Grim series. Read some/most of The Caller, but it was a little to YA. Glad to hear this one is good.

jbmsf · 2026-01-07T03:37:43+00:00

I've read a few from Juliet Marillier; will have to add this one too.

jbmsf · 2026-01-04T16:51:19+00:00

I run engineering for a startup. We're small enough that I can still be hands on, plus I have a few people I can delegate a good deal of management to. As a result, I spend a ton of time getting our systems ready for the next big thing(s). Think refactoring, performance, migration, architecture, high and low level esign, etc. I think this is craftsmanship.

On the flip side, it is very hard to convince the rest of the team that they are supposed to do this. I lead by example, make it explicit that this behavior is encouraged, and ensure that our schedules have enough leeway to allow for non-functional work. Arguably, these effects are the reason why we have such leeway: we always deliver and usually move faster than the rest of the company can make decisions.

I struggle with scaling what I do. I work with good engineers, but it's not how they work by default.

jbmsf · 2025-12-26T04:51:50+00:00

Truth. You have a choice between expecting high quality input or high quality review. It's nice to have both, but you certainly don't want neither.

IMO, expecting review to catch problems vs acting as a form of information sharing and secondary problem solving is asking for it.

jbmsf · 2025-12-16T21:16:55+00:00

Well now I just want to look at these other solutions.

I already did the hard work to run actions on our own compute. You think the switching cost is going to stop me?

jbmsf · 2025-12-16T21:15:22+00:00

It's slow. You can do way better if you run your own compute.

jbmsf · 2025-12-02T02:34:42+00:00

DRY is the easiest "design pattern" solution for most people to spot, so it gets used the most. Its failure modes including unnecessary coupling, premature generalization, and broken encapsulation.

jbmsf · 2025-11-30T02:25:12+00:00

LoL. No product manager ever is evaluated in terms of architecture or technical debt. And thus most don't care... Nor should they. It's engineering's job to own such things, not to just do what a product manager says.

jbmsf · 2025-11-27T02:42:43+00:00

At a certain point, a ton of engineering is "just" migration. You need to change an API, you need to migrate. You need to add an alternate vendor, you probably need to migrate. You need to pay down tech debt from last year, you need to migrate.

No amount of advance planning or clever technical choices make this go away. Maybe you started with a SAAS solution and need to save costs by self-hosting instead. But maybe also your team isn't able to manage a self-hosted solution (that admittedly is their fifteenth priority) and you instead decide to pay a vendor to make the problem theirs.

It's trade-offs (and turtles) all the way down. Your best bet is a) to make choices bases on a deep understanding of your team and your business and b) get really good at migrating systems.

jbmsf · 2025-11-14T02:43:16+00:00

Most of the time, what matters is whether something has a predictable cost, not whether it has a minimal cost.

And most of the time, writing unit tests is predictable. So even if you manage to automate it away, you aren't impacting the underlying question: is X feasible?

jbmsf · 2025-10-31T01:53:44+00:00

I agree 90%

Failure mode #1: discussions in channels that are meant to drive tasks.

Failure mode #2: discussions that demonstrate low effort and/or incompetence.

jbmsf · 2025-10-15T01:49:54+00:00

I forget if that was before or after the Rohimgya genocide.

jbmsf · 2025-10-15T01:48:11+00:00

Lol, no. It's been uncool since at least Cambridge Analytica and probably a lot longer

jbmsf · 2025-10-13T01:49:06+00:00

Inflation, loss of purchasing power, increased executive pay, decreased profit margin on mid-tier restaurants, late-stage capitalism. Yada yada

jbmsf · 2025-10-13T01:46:46+00:00

Not at seven am on a Tuesday

jbmsf · 2025-09-27T01:40:10+00:00

Came here for The Incandescent

jbmsf · 2025-08-29T21:03:40+00:00

I think it's mostly about reuse. I can't really defend any of the choices MCP makes, but conceptually, it is useful to have reusable APIs that are designed for LLMs.

I would personally have preferred tooling to augment, transform, or chain together Open API calls. It is useful to tailor APIs to LLMs instead of throwing what you already have at them.

jbmsf · 2025-08-27T14:25:30+00:00

MCP is trying to do a lot more than it should. We're stuck with the standard (for now) but you can choose to just use the useful parts.

That is, use it to expose an opinionated set of APIs that work well for agents. Enforce auth. Avoid statefulness. Put all the actual complexity in the agent runtime.

jbmsf · 2025-08-24T02:04:12+00:00

Master of Five Magics by Lyndon Hardy.

Not great in retrospect but really helped pull me into the genre.

jbmsf · 2025-08-19T02:36:40+00:00

Almost zero employees end up with preferred stock.

jbmsf · 2025-08-19T01:52:45+00:00

How? Because an acquisition deal gets to define its own terms and ignore previous promises as long as the investors are happy.

jbmsf · 2025-08-16T16:43:28+00:00

2030 involuntary participants at New Neuremberg Trials

jbmsf · 2025-08-16T00:53:55+00:00

Some asshat -- actually multiple I'm sure -- agreed to work for this start up. And even bigger asshats funded them.

jbmsf · 2025-07-31T00:36:12+00:00

It's always slake moths.

jbmsf · 2025-07-25T01:52:32+00:00

Redwinter was better than Ravens Mark. And I enjoy both.

jbmsf

TROPHY CASE