Lada Kesseler

"Software engineering is the only domain in which “legacy” has a negative connotation even though it is where we spend the vast majority of our working time."
medium.com/feenk/rewild...

It's rare to take a 6-hour masterclass and find this much value and change in myself. Usually takes weeks coding with mentors to see this level of impact. Still internalizing what I learned in Kent Beck's workshop. Wrote about one change I noticed today: lexler.substack.com/p/why-option...

Love this Kent Beck quote:
"I thought I was getting paid for what I had done.
I wasn’t. I was mostly getting paid for what I could do next."

It really captures the gist of what I bring to the table as a developer. Genies are helpful but they can't do this, they run at walls at super speeds.

...I think my Claude just tried to commit suicide

Another example, from designing with a genie -- that one is generated by Claude Code.

Here's an example -- ASCII is really not too bad for quickly building understanding and taking visual notes. Also genies are awesome at generating it, I use it a lot to poke at new codebases on higher level and quickly build understanding.

In the spirit of the masterclass, I'm working through my notes and improving them via ASCII diagrams: while I want to some day learn how to do beautiful visual notes, some visual notes that capture the essence now are better than beautiful notes never. And they are actually turning out quite good.

One thing where I noticed the change after Kent Beck's masterclass is around perfectionism: I have much better intuition now that quality is a lever I can use and not a binary thing, and I have much better sense of when to invest in improving structure of the code and when not to.

Kent Beck's masterclass "Tidy Together: A Software Design Workshop" has been fantastic. There's been two evens in the last month when I went "whoa, this seriously changes how I will operate from now on", and this masterclass was one of them.

Reading "Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!" and it feels like coming home from the very first chapter. Good sign, I guess? I started my career with Akka, and it's good to be thinking and talking about actors again. I probably should have done this sooner.

Tip from Elisabeth Hendrickson that's been super helpful: when using AI for thinking/research, ask for "deep insights, including things I might not want to hear."

It's like a secret menu - bypasses the flattery and gets you better feedback.

Really enjoyed Elisabeth Hendrickson's masterclass on systems thinking. One of the interesting insights: teams need variability to learn and improve. The extreme pursuit of perfection kills flexibility and hurts growth - you need space to safely experiment and learn.

Testing the winds 🦋