about:drewcsillag

At the end of this most recent January, I wrote Narrowing the Cone of Error, The Origin Story of a High Output AI Coding Workflow, a story about how I had built my AI development workflow.

The Origin Story of /feature I’ve been interested in personal organization tools for a long time, and never really been happy with them.

Last updated: 2025-04-03 Drew Csillag Email: drew@thecsillags.com Blog: https://drew.thecsillags.com/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/drewcsillag GitHub: https://github.com/drewcsillag Computer Skills Have worked professionally with: Java, SQL, JSON,…

This is a presentation I’ve done now about six times, starting back about 6 years ago.

When I switched to management last year on April 5, one of the things I wanted to start with was to make sure that my teams understood what they could expect from me and hold me to.

I’ve only been weaving for about four months now, but have had a lot of fun doing four shaft patterns on my rigid heddle loom (a 16" Kromski Harp Forte).

I’ve done various forms of retros over the years, one of which I blogged about too.

I did a talk for my org, Developer Experience (formerly part of EEE), based on my Influence Without Authority post I did back in 2021.

YAML, go templated YAML, HOCON, HCL(2), GCL, JSON.

There’s a chunk of code I’ve been playing with the last two and a half-ish years (judging by its git history) that for me is just really cool.

I’ve been working with people and talking about their organization systems to help their systems help them.

I get asked about blockchain, crypto, NFTs, and such every once in a while, and rather than counting on my memory to remember the whole thing, I decided to just do a quick write up.

I had spoken to a recruiter, Harrison Edney, at some point a while ago, and we had a really great conversation.

I saw the article in Communications of the ACM “What Does Saying That ‘Programming Is Hard’ Really Say, and About Whom?”

Many common archetypes of staff engineer involve a moderate to large scope of influence.

For at least as long since I came up with The Agile Organizer I’ve been using disc binding systems like the Arc-M from Staples.

A co-worker recently gave a talk on shuffle sharding and the thought came to me: we know that that for n things taken k at a time you have nCk, and what that evaluates to; given n and k.

As you get more experience in being a software engineer, the trajectory that companies I have worked for look for you to be able to expand your scope.

It all started because I suck at the log searching tool I’ll call <LST>¹.

When working in a code base that’s been around for a while, you will find lies in the code.

This is very much a crackpot post.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the course of my career in other people’s code, and as a result, I’ve learned a lot about what kinds of things make code easy to navigate, and which things made reading and debugging code more difficult.

I’ve know for a long time that you could convert any iterative function to be recursive and vice versa, but up until recently, I only knew how to go from iterative to recursive in a mostly formulaic way.

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(see here for the full Agile Organizer series) I’ve been using the agile organizer for better than four years and it’s worked swimmingly.

Andrew Csillag Sea Cliff Gospel Chapel, NY August 11, 2019 Why?

(see here for all the posts about using a diver’s bezel) I’ve written a few posts about things you can do with a diver’s bezel, and today, I’m adding a few more.

While I’ve had my organizer figured out for over four years (see here for the full series), I had struggled with the choice of writing utensil.

For my current job, I’ve had to learn how accounting works.

A couple of good reads I’ve encountered in the last month or so that cover things I’ve thought myself, but are written much better than I would have: The Beginner’s Creed - something I’ll probably keep in my notebook in perpetuity.

(see here for the full Agile Organizer series) I’ve now been using my agile organizer system for now going on three years, with a few adjustments, but the main principles firmly in place.

(see here for all the posts about using a diver’s bezel) I previously wrote about things that you can do with a divers watch bezel.

a.k.a.

Back at the end of December, I posted 17 Frets Chords, a concise chord dictionary.

I’ve been using this now for a bit, and now that I’ve not made any changes to it in a few months, and after a failed pitch at selling it to a publisher, I’ve decided to release this into the wild.

All of the 17 Frets series books are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Since it’s related to my day job, it’s over on Medium.

My Gravatar: Here’s my resume.

For Christmas last year, my wife bought me a Seiko SKX-009 which I absolutely love.

I’ve been interested in timekeeping devices for many years, and have generally been facinated with watches, and in the last year or so, I’ve become I big fan of mechanical ones.

N.B.

It’s funny sometimes how when you’ve done something in a particular way for long enough, it’s easy to forget why you do it the way you do.

It’s been close to a year since I started my shorthand quest in earnest.

When designing storage systems for applications, not building something like a SQL/NoSQL database, I’m talking the layer/logic that goes on top, you have to consider a whole bunch of things if you want to build the “right thing(TM)” for your application.

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Somewhat written to future-me, but also to others who may be looking in the direction of these things.

When writing Java servers (or servlets that run in a container), I’ve learned a few things that have saved me a bunch of trouble during development, as well as later on.

I think that most people would agree these days that dependency injection is a good thing for many reasons.

When starting as a software developer, everything seems like magic, compilers, IDEs, networking, kernels, etc.

Background I started my professional career with a Pascal program (I know that dates me a bit) and then continued with C and C++ and discovered Python around version 1.4 and used it heavily for over ten years, and really didn’t like Java when I first met…