What to Read

If you’re choosing software, I wrote a somewhat irreverent guide on how to do that. Even software engineers will find it useful.

If you’re a developer, I wrote a career course. If you’re early in your career, it’ll add a million dollars to your lifetime earnings  by giving you a clear, upward path. Supposedly knowing a little about negotiation adds a million bucks (compound interest, etc.), and this goes way beyond that. Many (most?) senior devs don’t know this stuff.

If you are considering going to college, or have a kid, I wrote how you’re probably going to waste $200K on your education. But also, how not to waste that money.

If you’re curious about how America will radically change over the next 5-10 years, I wrote about the rise of the robot chauffeurs. Or as most call them, autonomous vehicles. I spent weeks researching it, and can’t tell you how many times my mind was blown.

I also give talks on careers and programmer productivity, if you need a speaker for your conference. Reviews have all been positive.

While I’m changing how you see the world, here are three documentaries that have done that for me:

Latest Articles

Notes on AI / GPT / LLM

Thought I'd share my notes on GPT/AI in advance of tonight's online discussion of GitHub Copilot. I've been doing a deep dive on AI as it relates to my particular consulting practice area, programmer productivity, starting with an 80 page article by Stephen Wolfram on...

samkgg Lessons Learned

(This is a regularly updated page where I document what I've learned while building samkgg, a demo app for AWS SAM, Kotlin, GraalVM, Gradle, and other technologies as this progresses. Read the samkgg blog post first to understand what I'm doing. You can find the...

samkgg: AWS SAM + Kotlin + Graalvm + Gradle

I am starting a new open source project called samkgg. It's a learning in public project that I hope will help others who want to adopt these technologies. You can find it here: https://github.com/madeupname/samkgg I thought I'd explain a bit about why and how I chose...

Shipt: An In-Depth Review

UPDATE 10/5/2020: TL;DR - 3rd party grocery delivery services cost 50% more than delivery directly from the supermarket. I ordered directly from the supermarket (Vons, $100 total) and compared it to the same order from Shipt. The store had: Same number of delivery...

What is the Mautic Plugin Published setting?

If you've installed Mautic and head over to plugins, you notice there is a setting called "Published" with choices Yes or No. Inexplicably, there is absolutely no documentation on this. Published means enabled. Apparently, they thought it was obvious since the tab is...

Java’s New Pricing

Java’s New Pricing

I recently attended a talk by Georges Saab, Java head honcho at Oracle. The following is an executive summary, simply explained so you can understand the changes and plan accordingly. If you use Java commercially, the odds of you reading this and saying, "We're fine,...

What Is It, Really?

What Is It, Really?

"What is it, really?" Those four words launch a boondoggle. It starts with smart software engineers. Smart and bored. They're using a software library or tool to solve a problem. They have a lot of options to choose from. Multiple open source and commercial solutions,...