Jeff Chen

The dangers of social media and addictive technologies are well-documented.

I’ve been self-coached for a few years now; a couple spent just weight lifting, and the last two seriously competing in open & masters track meets.

Popular culture doesn’t seem to value hard work and grit: what’s glamorized is either effortless excellence (really, just the image of effortless excellence—ask these paragons and you’ll find all of them put in the work) and intentional ineptitude.

I'm getting in right at the buzzer here, so no thoughts about the month.

I think I'm a fairly productive person—I thought it'd be interesting to categorize some of my work-style habits as following the conventional wisdom around productivity or not.

At Ladder, our approach to observability and monitoring has matured a lot over the three years I've been part of the team.

I've competed in track events since 2006, and I thought it'd be fun to look back and see how I've progressed since then.

Making decisions can be nerve-wracking!

Another month in quarantine.

Measuring your Javascript bundle size is an important way to keep client load times low.

Tyler Cowen asks: "What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?

Why do people have midlife crises?

Emily and I spent last October in Boise, Idaho.

After a relaxing holidays, I'm back and at it in 2021!

I think that contrary to popular opinion, friendships don't become deep because of similarities or differences in personality or interests.

At CMU, our outdoor season typically started in the beginning of March.

In college, I assumed that success in software engineering came from technical skills—that superstar programmers were those that could write the fastest/best/most code.

New years are a time for both reflection and looking forward.

I thought it'd be fun to take a look at some stats from 2020.

It's the end of the year!

Rules: unless otherwise specified, these predictions are for what will be true on 1/1/2022.

As a baby I never wanted to go to sleep: I stayed alert until I was completely exhausted (and my parents were too)!

This isn’t medical advice.

I recently spent some time developing a custom watch face for my Garmin Forerunner 245.

I've interviewed hundreds of engineering candidates across multiple companies.

What’s the lowest body fat percentage I can sustain without risking injury or losing strength?

I'm back in the Bay Area and back into my usual routine!

Although HTML lets developers define \ elements with images and captions, Markdown doesn't provide a built-in syntax for it.

Sprinting is one of the most explosive movements an athlete can perform - it requires maximal effort, coordination, and concentration.

I have lots of life goals, both short-term and long: I’d like to work on my side projects, become a better writer, read great books, run faster, get stronger...

Last updated 12/1/2020 It's getting harder to find tracks to run on in the Bay Area.

2020's been a bad year in a lot of ways.

Four years after leaving CMU a school record holder and captain of the track team, I'm faster and stronger than ever!

I've been in Boise all month!

This post dives deep into a scary data loss scenario - we'll cover identifying the data loss, investigating the root cause, and finally recovering the data.

One piece of unattributed wisdom that's stuck with me is "don't take more than one technology bet".

It's election time!

In Boise, gyms are open!

I bought a Freelap BT112 kit earlier this year.

I'm going to Idaho for the month of October!

This month, I've been really focused on work - we have a big launch coming very soon, so I've spent more hours than normal coordinating & building things for that.

The biggest piece of news for the month: I moved out of SF into my parent's house in Dublin!

I've been working with fixed-width containers in React recently, so I've been able to focus on typesetting.

This post is cross-posted from Ladder's engineering blog.