Further Heitz

Only the Pronoid Thrive

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Only the Paranoid Survive” by Andrew Grove (former CEO of Intel) is a useful framework for understanding today’s AI inflection point — but its perspective biases about power, fear, and who gets to navigate change reveal exactly why the tech industry keeps failing the people it claims to serve. What’s happening in Minnesota right now proves that the opposite of Grove’s thesis is true: it’s not paranoia that carries people through inflection points — it’s mutual aid, collective care, and hope for a better future.

Liner Notes for a Diagram

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At a friend’s job, they ask newcomers what the kids movie song for their career would be. It’s an oddly revealing question (I suppose unexpected queries have that advantage even if I think asking someone how many golfballs would fill a schoolbus is pretty obnoxious. I’m not sure that it’s any more ridiculous and aggravating than making experienced professionals design high scale systems alone on a whiteboard in front of a panel of dudes named John and Dave)

No

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI Stole My Side Project

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Learning to Code before LLMs

The standard advice when I was a new engineer for learning how to code was to pick a project you really wanted to do and try to make progress on it. I found this supremely unhelpful, because if I threw out some ideas, it would turn out everything I wanted to make was not beginner-friendly (“you need a database for that! you’d have to figure out graphics!”). When you’re truly a beginner, sizing tasks is hard. (Let’s be real, sizing tasks is always hard.) And for me, writing software has always been a fundamentally social activity. I want to build things that others will want to use.

Speed and Safety

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

“You have to go slow to go fast.”
and
Speed is safety"

Both of these phrases are oft-quoted in software. Each have individually been well-explained by better writers and engineers than me, but I think the combination can get confusing when we talk about innovation and building new software systems.

The best metaphor I have for this is downhill skiing (I did a lot of ski racing in high school).

Slow Preparation

Slow is important before a race. Do you have the right equipment? The mechanics feel intuitive to me now, but equipment is vital to speed in skiing. Collecting and maintaining the right gear is half the challenge in reducing friction:

About

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 02:13:50 +0000

About Me

I once helped a group of pilots negotiate entry across the Syrian border by serving as their on the fly Arabic interpreter.

In college I signed up for creative writing, but dropped after the second session when my classmates spent the whole time critiquing short story characters as “unrealistic” by which they apparently meant “containing literally any positive or altruistic traits”. The thought of spending a semester surrounded by that kind of cynicism was unbearable to me.

High Performing Engineering Cultures Are Not The Abominable Snow Monster

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

What is a good engineering culture even?

The DORA 2023 report came out in October, and I’m just catching up with it now. This year’s report subtitle? Culture is everything. And I agree.

I feel like it’s important to note at the outset of this post that DORA is directed at uncovering approaches to software engineering that result in consistent delivery of the most business value. Sometimes when I talk about engineering culture, I feel like many people perceive it as a soft concern. The idea that people vs technology are separate considerations - even mutually exclusive skills - feels so deeply embedded as a belief that if you want to talk about how the two interact, it can be an uphill climb.

Immersion Learning

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

An announcement!

I started a new job on Monday! I’m super excited to be working at Drip on an incredible team working to power the ecommerce rebellion.

This is a big shift for me, because the stack, languages, and frameworks at use at Drip are totally different than those that I’ve worked within before. I spent a solid five minutes on my first day trying to figure out how to right click on a Mac, as a lifelong Windows (and occasional Linux) user.

ExpandoObject

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I came across a neat C# feature the other day - the ExpandoObject class. It’s been available since .Net 4, but I’d never seen it used in any of the codebases where I’ve worked. It combines with the ‘dynamic’ keyword (which I have come across, but only infrequently), and the Microsoft docs have this to say about the purpose:

The ExpandoObject class enables you to add and delete members of its instances at run time and also to set and get values of these members.
ExpandoObject class - Microsoft

A Batter Way to Handle the Whisks of Technical Change

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a cool feature of C# 8 that I found use for in an application I’m developing. In my context, it’s useful because I have both a few types of things that share logic, as well as patterns that can apply in any combination to multiple things that have fixed relationships to other implementations.

I can’t find the original example that put me onto this possibility, but here is a similar blog post detailing their own example - C# Default Interface Methods

Building Psychological Safety

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago, I read this article in the NYT What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team, by Charles Duhigg. A lot of it resonated with me, especially this finding:

The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the
‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated
one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s
collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team,
even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.

Greatest Hits: Tech Talks

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I watch a lot of tech talks. These are my favorite that I’ve watched recently, with what I love about them and keep returning to for inspiration or clarity.

Teamwork & Leadership

Being Glue - Tanya Reilly
Confession/boast: the nicest feedback I ever got from another developer was that I’m “like slime”. By that this person clarified they meant I’m good at filling the gaps of a project to move things forward. So I relate to a lot of this talk personally.

Pretty Consoles and Other Tool Aesthetics

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Adding Color and Art to your Command Line

On GUI Shaming and a Mountain of Hot Takes

I will admit, I’m a GUI girl at heart. I love a good app design and user experience. For me I find discovering options within an application more intuitive with visual cues of some kind.

However, like any good engineer, I believe in using the right tool for the job. A lot of times, this means I do basic work in a GUI but then end up opening a terminal when I need to do something more complex. This is especially true with git. I have used different clients over the years (I <3 Git Fork currently - https://git-fork.com/), and it’s gorgeous for when I just need to pull or push a branch. Anything more complex (say an interactive rebase, where I only want to keep some commits) and I open up a command line.

Tricky Triggers

Wed, 06 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The situation

A little while ago, I was faced with a database server that had run out of storage. It had been out in the world for awhile, and no one was watching it particularly closely. It was running on a deprecated version of SQL Server Express that limited it to 4gb per database.

I created a new instance of the database with the same schema in an upgraded version with cloud support for scaling and started loading and testing it, while manually babysitting the original one to clear out data often enough to keep the application up. I thought it was going pretty smoothly, but another engineer I work with – who doesn't ordinarily interact with databases - was frustrated: "Can't you just set it to limit each attribute to a certain number of rows?" he asked.