Rocky Warren

No, and you don't need to.

Complaining is contagious.

The move that separated my best agent workflows from my worst: throwaway Storybook stories, test-driven development, adversarial review, and starting with the interface.

Knowing when to leave a place you love is harder than knowing when to leave one you don't.

Agents already out-code junior engineers.

Clipboard has tripled deploys per engineer by letting local agents run well-defined tickets through the plan, ship, review, and fix loop.

Leaving a dream job wasn't a mistake, but it cost me a sense of mission I only found again years later, watching a nurse hit a bug in an app I helped build.

Coding agents went from writing none of Clipboard's code to nearly all of it in a year, and flaky tests broke the feedback loop they depend on.

What Staff Engineering is, how it differs from Engineering Management and from Senior, and how I think about the role's expectations and principles.

A Senior Staff Engineer's work principles from twenty years as a software engineer.

Some of my favorite articles along with their ChatGPT-produced summaries.

Ideas are easy.

Ideas are easy.

Iteration speed is crucial to startup success.

Moving fast is a crucial competitive advantage.

Best practices for working with AWS's simple queue service (SQS).

Securely share secret passwords over text messages, send end-to-end encrypted emails, or store password-protected files on USB and cloud drives.

Solve "MMS delivery failure; please contact Google Fi Support", "Account access only" and "Your SIM card couldn't be read" errors on GrapheneOS with Google Fi.

Connect to Relational Database Service (RDS) database instances in private Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) subnets from a local machine using EC2 bastion hosts (jump boxes).

On my son's first birthday, I stopped drinking with the goal of reassessing after four months.

A primer on digital signatures and multi-party computation, a threshold signature scheme used to, among other things, securely sign blockchain transactions.

Implementing a deep work culture and fostering it as companies grow gives startups strong competitive advantages over larger companies.

It's up to each team to decide if an async standup is right for them.

Recent APIs I've built follow both the OpenAPI (formerly known as Swagger) and JSON:API specs.

Scala is great for recent microservices I've written, enabling incredible velocity.

Run Linux apps in Docker on Mac using an X Window system to avoid cross compiling dependencies or to sandbox an app.

...unless YAML counts as code.

Git can seem overwhelming, but while performing typical day-to-day tasks, you'll use only about ten commands.

A comparison of PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch full-text search over 1.5 million key-value pairs containing strings, numbers, and dates.

Rather than using random examples from Scala projects in the wild, these are meant as my evolving "best" way of doing things.

Like any new technology, Scala and its ecosystem take a while to master and can be frustrating at times.

I played around with Kotlin recently and was pretty impressed.

Scala allows you to accomplish tasks in different ways.

Occasionally, IntelliJ goes haywire and won't run your project or tests.

One of the cons of working from home is deciding when enough is enough.

In March, Dwolla's engineering team launched an updated webhook notifications architecture, cutting delivery times during peak load from minutes to seconds...

In March, Dwolla updated its webhooks to a serverless architecture, improving their timeliness, configurability, cost and reliability.

Encryption is a two-way function.

I've only dabbled with Go in my spare time, but compiled this list of resources I found helpful.

After my rest day, I'm anxious to get moving.

It's been over five months since this trip and I haven't finished the blog.

The long way through Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest looks like a good one as I'll be riding Pine tree-lined highway all day.

It's in the low 30s and snowing when I wake up in Santa Fe.

I wake up in Roswell and attempt to put my shirt on.

When I spent time in El Cosmico's office yesterday, there was a steady stream of people coming in to check out.

In the middle of the night in the Terlingua, I wake up in complete darkness and think for a second I'm back home.

Waking up in Del Rio, I haul my stuff down to the bike, drop my key card in the motel office, and grab a half cup of coffee.

I wake up after my second night in Austin ready to go.

The sixth day starts like the last few, I wake up in a strange room and it takes me a second to remember which town I'm in.

I wake up in New Orleans with every intention of staying a second night.