A contemplation of how feature management tools might evolve to better support how feature flags are used in practice| bpapillon.com
Inputs This month, I read Ted Chiang’s two books of short stories, Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others, both of which were incredible. Chiang’s stories are often presented in the first person, and he allows the circumstances of the story and protagonist to affect the writing style of a story; two of my favorite stories, Story of Your Life (which was the basis for the movie Arrival) and Understand, are both good examples of this.| bpapillon.com
Inputs Meghan, Jasper, and I camped at Jekyll Island for a few days to celebrate our wedding anniversary. It was Jasper’s first time seeing the ocean, and our first vacation in quite a while without other family or friends joining. It’s a friendly, quiet place to get away – we loved it. I finally finished the second book in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series, which I had been pecking at all year.| bpapillon.com
Several of my past companies have had an onboarding convention where a new developer makes a code change that is deployed to production on their first day, or at least their first day after any company-wide onboarding is finished. This is hard to pull off, but in some ways that can be a benefit, and there are a lot of good reasons to do it. Here are a few:| bpapillon.com
Inputs The only book I read this month was Andy Weir’s latest, Project Hail Mary, which delivered more or less as promised - a scientifically dense but nonetheless easy-to-read page-turner that is surely destined for the silver screen. I spent a lot of time with newer rap releases this month, including Dave’s “We’re All in this Alone Together”, Mach-Hommy’s “Pray for Haiti”, and Vince Staples’ self-titled album. I also fell down a deep Phoebe Bridgers rabbit hole, but that b...| bpapillon.com
Fynn Glover and I worked together at Matcha, where he was CEO. Fynn and I have always enjoyed debating topics outside of work relating to history and economics, and recently decided to collaborate on a post for his blog. I’ve cross-posted it here, and recommend everyone subscribe to his blog for similar posts about technology, history, economics, and literature. Recently, Fynn and I both listened to an interview with Marc Andreesen.| bpapillon.com
Inputs This month, I started my new job at Relay Payments after a few weeks off. So far so good - I’ve been working throughout their stack, and it’s been a nice change of pace to work on React/Typescript, as well as being challenged to level up my Go skills. I have a draft underway about what I’m learning as I try to ramp up on the latter, but I’ll say that Effective Go was probably the most useful resource thus far.| bpapillon.com
I’ve been in software management roles for the past six years or so. As I prepare to take on a role that will shift my attention away from management for a while, here are a few things I’ve learned during that time about how to be a good manager.| bpapillon.com
In the last few weeks, I left my position at Springbot, about six months after I joined the company as part of its acquisition of Matcha, and will be joining the engineering team at Relay Payments later this month.| bpapillon.com