/ Recent content on Further Heitz Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Kelly Heitz Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /post/liner-notes-for-a-venn-diagram/ Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /post/liner-notes-for-a-venn-diagram/ 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) /page/no/ Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /page/no/ /post/ai-stole-my-side-project/ Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /post/ai-stole-my-side-project/ 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! /post/speed_and_safety/ Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 /post/speed_and_safety/ “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). /page/about/ Fri, 05 Jan 2024 02:13:50 +0000 /page/about/ 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. /post/eng-culture-abominable-snow-monster/ Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 /post/eng-culture-abominable-snow-monster/ 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. /post/new-job-immersion-learning/ Thu, 30 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /post/new-job-immersion-learning/ 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. /post/c-sharp-expando-object/ Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /post/c-sharp-expando-object/ 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. /post/c-sharp-static-interface-methods/ Tue, 07 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /post/c-sharp-static-interface-methods/ 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 /post/psychological-safety/ Wed, 17 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /post/psychological-safety/ 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, /post/favorite-talks/ Fri, 12 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /post/favorite-talks/ 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. /post/pretty-console/ Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /post/pretty-console/ 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. /post/tricky-triggers/ Wed, 06 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /post/tricky-triggers/ 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.