Human built with mostly AI, some real world experience
I’m Jeff Kantarek, Rubyist and Elixir dev with a flare for F1, comics, cooking and showing up every day for my family. My main hobby is having hobbies. My current obsession is remodeling my home that was originally built in 1892!
You can find me in Wicker Park if you’re on planet earth. You can also find me on linkedin.com/in/jkantarek or see what I’m coding up on github.com/jkantarek. I’m trying to get better at writing and communicating my ideas, if you care about that you’re in the right place.
Where are the analog computer startups?
We used to live in a world with only analog computers. Purpose built machines that could take an input and give the output. Take the Antikythera mechanism an ancient analog timekeeper on steroids. While trivial for us today this was a huge military advantage to coordinate ship movements across time and space. Military requirements for computing ballistic trajectories were all analog and capable of computing “firing solutions.” Someone literally has to do the math and come up with a solution.
Le gâteau de l’abstraction
Are you the kind of developer that feels perpetually lost in a codebase? Do you struggle to figure out where and how to make changes? Is every day like cutting into a 100 layer surprise cake where only madness spills out? You’re missing out on abstraction layers. Little slices of comfort that you can stand on and pretend only one problem exists. Building confidence your abstractions will help you better reason through your code and the systems you interact with.
In the weeds
I cook for fun and to feel better about failing. The most satisfying meals are the big ones where everything arrives hot and on time. Then there are others where you get in the weeds and everything starts falling apart. You have to start picking and editing what happens next and who you’re likely to disappoint to get things back on track. Some software developers live in the weeds, trying to get features out the door or getting pulled into on-call firefighting can be an every day problem. Getting out of the weeds requires two important steps: identifying the next worst problem, and sitting down to do the work.
Be a farfalle developer
Do you find yourself writing code that needs to exist everywhere before you write a test or have confidence that it is working? Are you the kind of developer that does print development or needs to have a UI to see your work in action? It’s important to recognize that practice is forcing you to think about multiple domains and edge cases all at the same time. Your code change becomes a new strand of spaghetti in a code base that is already full of lots of spaghetti. Instead be a Farfalle developer. Write code that is compact and clear. It has clear inputs and outputs with a protected piece of logic in the middle.
The little brains that could aka Prompt Engineering through the lens of parenthood
One of my absolute favorite Ted talks that I share with every new parent is called “The Birth of a Word.” It unlocked an idea for me that learning words is as much about context as it is content.