I write about software development, tools, and people.
And how marketing makes it all better.
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Your career is long, and it has a lot of fluctuations, but you’ll never regret being curious about your industry, your role, and how people interact with computers.
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LDX3: How to Write Right Now
The hard part of technical writing is not figuring out what order to put words in. Indeed, an LLM can do a medium job of that given a sound prompt. The hard part is thinking through the context that makes…
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New Phone Day
In many ways, the teams that have made it possible to port so much from one device to another have been doing excellent progressive delivery, as have the teams that have pushed out OS and security updates to our phones,…
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Consent-Based Computing
Can’t make me! Possibly not everyone has this immediate reaction to software telling them to do something, like SIGN UP NOW or TRY AI or USE OUR CHATBOT. I do. My day is full of ignoring that reaction and also…
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Swag in the year 2025
Trade wars are hard on marketing in a lot of ways, but if you do conference-focused swag, now is the time to worry.
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Bluesky and your brand
Get your account established Watch before you post Remember that this part of the internet is permanent Be kind and human, as well as a brand
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The Ambassador from Ruritania
Being a developer advocate is a bit like being an ambassador in another country. Your ceremonial roles sometimes hide your real negotiations and strategic power.
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Englishes
American Tech English, is, I think, a kind of constructed English, similar to Simplified English. It’s not quite as rigorously enforced as Simplified English, but I am one of its enforcers. I will strip nuance out of sentences, and prioritize…
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Lady Conference Speaker: Presenter roulette
You deserve to feel like wherever you’re speaking supports you and your talk. Hopefully they tell you up front what they expect, or send you videos, or give you practice time. But if they don’t, I promise it’s reasonable to…
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Linters and style guides and standards and tests
Consistency matters. Consistency matters for branding, because of copyright and recognition reasons, because you’re investing lots of money into that exact arrangement of letters. Consistency matters for code, because computers are terrible at approximation and “close enough”. Consistency matters for documentation,…