I'm • King'ori Maina

In my colophon, I mention that I run this site on a dedicated Hetzner box that I self-manage, and that everything is containerised with Docker and orchestrated with Docker Swarm.

I am on leave as I write this, and I have been sharing quite a lot with people around me about how I use AI in my engineering work.

AI is often described as knowing a lot.

For a long time, the difficulty of building things acted as a filter.

How to become expert at thing: 1 iteratively take on concrete projects and accomplish them depth wise, learning “on demand” (ie don’t learn bottom up breadth wise) 2 teach/summarize everything you learn in your own words 3 only compare yourself to younger…

I’ve been learning Elixir and Phoenix recently, slowly and a bit unevenly, mostly by building small things and paying attention to what feels different from how I’m used to working.

There’s a quality I’ve come to value in the people I enjoy working with or learning from: they have opinions.

I came across an old post on X from Andrej Karpathy that simply said: Agency > Intelligence.

A thread I came across recently on X by Gabriel Petersson has been stuck in my head.

Sometimes, we hold back because we want what we build to be perfect.

I'm rather conservative about the tools that I choose to use.

The handoff model of software development, where analysts understand the business and developers understand code, sounds clean in theory.

As engineers, we often obsess over tools and syntax, forgetting that the real advantage lies in understanding why the software exists.

Douglas Adams once said our view of technology changes with age: 1.

This simple insight from Farnam Street captures one of the most powerful but underutilised thinking tools: inversion.