Specializing in Being a Generalist
When I wrote in January that I was leaving Artsy, I reflected on my career progression:| Ash Furrow
When I wrote in January that I was leaving Artsy, I reflected on my career progression:| Ash Furrow
In 2015, [I wrote][2015] about my next steps in [Artsy’s engineering career ladder][ladder]. I laid out the steps that I would be focusing on, like multiplying effectiveness of cross-team work and having an obvious technical impact on the team’s strategic trajectory. I’ve made progress on these points, to varying degrees, but that’s not what I want to talk about.| Ash Furrow
I'm excited to announce that today is my first day working at Wealthsimple! I'll be working as a staff developer on their mobile app. In a previous blog post, I teased that this role was a perfect fit for me. Today, I'm excited to share some details. But...| Ash Furrow's Blog
As I discussed previously, I've been rewriting this blog in a new tool called 11ty (aka Eleventy - the project's devs aren't consistent so I won't be either). This is the first blog post written in the new blog engine, and the migration is complete! I...| Ash Furrow's Blog
I want to discuss my career trajectory and a chronic issue I’ve identified with my job satisfaction since becoming a staff developer. It’s been subtle and I didn’t notice it for years. Maybe this will resonate with you.| Ash Furrow
It's with mixed emotions that I'm announcing today is my last day working at Float . I've accomplished a lot here and I'm grateful for the opportunity to help shape such a young company and product team. I'm sad to say goodbye to my coworkers and I wish everyone the best. Whatever job I'm in, I always learn something…| Ash Furrow
I have been a blogger for most of my adult life (a dubious honour) and have, over a decade, used a variety of blogging platforms. My first blog, hosted on BlogSpot and please don't go looking for it, centred around my personal explorations of atheism. When I started blogging about software development in 2011, I had…| Ash Furrow
In 2019, I rewrote this blog with Gatsby . I outlined my reasons in that post, but basically I wanted to use similar technology to build my blog as I used day-to-day at work. Middleman, Bootstrap, and jQuery seemed old and busted. Gatsby, React, and TypeScript seemed so much more fun. When I launched the rewrite…| Ash Furrow
I've been a huge fan of The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells for a few years now, and was very excited to see it adapted to television on Apple TV+. Every adaptation of a story to a new medium has to make creative choices and tradeoffs; it's fun to pick apart the work to identify what's been changed, think…| Ash Furrow
I've been using Cursor for coding tasks lately, trying to explore what kinds of work it performs well and poorly. It's pretty good at most…| Ash Furrow's Blog
Imagine you are a software developer. It's the early 1970's and you make a living writing Basic Assembly Language to build software for the System/360 mainframe. You are great at your job and you enjoy it. You keep hearing about new "high level" programming languages that would allow you to write code in a way that…| Ash Furrow
Recently, I published my first photo blog post since 2018 . (Yes I have a separate photo blog, because of course I do.) So what's up with that? Nothing better than a blog post about another blog post. I haven't really been doing a lot of photography since the pandemic, but I had been increasingly drawn to it over the…| Ash Furrow
My keyboard rabbit hole has inevitably brought me to the world of alternate keyboard layouts. While I briefly used Dvorak in university, I was using too many different computers to make it really stick for me. I had on heard of Colemak from Christian Selig's keyboard video less than a year ago. It sounded great…| Ash Furrow
A few months ago, I came across this amazing video from Christian Selig detailing how he built his own keyboard . And I mean built it. Unknown to me up to that point, there exists both the tools and community such that anyone could design and build, from scratch, their own custom computer keyboard. The printed…| Ash Furrow
