Iggy

Techie with a passion for good stories.

[Iggy @IR73682738]

All authors love praise from critics, but let’s be honest—nothing beats a glowing review from a 7-year-old fan😊

https://t.co/H4iXWr4odh

#ChildrensBooks #fantasy

[Iggy @IR73682738]

When any of my engineering managers say I should hire a project manager to help them "move things forward", I always whip out this diagram and ask who's going to pay for the overhead in all that extra communication.

Then I let them go...

...back to work.

[Iggy @IR73682738]

In 1999, looking for a subject for my Master's thesis in Applied Mathematics, I ran across a framework implementing a 4-layer perceptron. I wanted to extend it and showcase its uses for basic pattern recognition for my degree.
When I brought it back to the faculty curator for approval, he called it "non-deterministic voodoo" and told me it had nothing to do with math.
There hasn't been a day in the last 5 years when I wasn't thinking how this one guy completely obliterated my future as an MLP expert.

[Iggy @IR73682738]

Every time I open a social media app, I'm drowning in AI slop complaining about AI slop.

This is so meta, I'm starting to think this is the Metaverse we were promised..🤖

[Iggy @IR73682738]

Vibe coding is great for demos and POCs. Huge value on its own. But shipping a real product still takes a team. That's just where we are rn.

So the play is not to put your half-baked app in production and bathe in 1-star reviews for the rest of its short, miserable life. It's:

1. Vibe code a working prototype.
2. Use it to get funded, hire real engineers.

[Iggy @IR73682738]

You know what? I lied about math being the only fundamental skill that outlives any innovation.

There's one more. It's called SQL.

I picked it up back in 1995, used it 3 times this week.

This is the only programming language I learned from my father that I will pass on to my kids.

[Iggy @IR73682738]

A little perspective goes a long way.

My dad went from Fortran on punch cards to C on floppy disks.

I went from procedural programming to OOP, components, and cloud computing.

This generation is moving from code to AI skills and prompts.

My kids will probably go from elaborate prompts to simply expressing ideas.

What looks like the end of an era for an engineer is just another layer of abstraction for a mathematician.

[Iggy @IR73682738]

How to hire an executive consultant to restructure your engineering org:

- Ask your best engineering leader to help vet the eye-wateringly expensive consultants your top firm sent over.

- Slowly realize he knows more about running engineering teams than any of these consultants who've never written a line of code in their lives.

- Give him the job, meaty equity, and your full backing against the office politics.

Win.

[Iggy @IR73682738]

Unironically, the "AI revolution" just confirmed something I already learned from two immigrations and rebuilding my career from scratch, multiple times.

The secret to professional success in tech isn't coding. It's mathematics.

Solid math skills, and you'll find work in the most unexpected places.

Without it, you won't find work even where you expected to.

Don't teach your kids to code.

Teach them math.

[Iggy @IR73682738]

The software community is overindexing on LLM models and agentic coding tools, while paying little to no attention to the main condition for success.

Here's what I discovered moving a 1,500-strong engineering organization from SDLC to AIDLC over the last 12 months.

The model, harness, or platform you're using doesn't matter that much. It was GitHub Copilot yesterday, Devin AI today, Claude Code tomorrow and next year it'll be something else.

What matters is an exhaustive, accurate knowledge base that describes your functionality, architecture, and APIs. If you have that part down to a science, you get high-quality, deployable code regardless of which tools you use. If you don't, even the greatest models will give you garbage in, garbage out every time.

[Iggy @IR73682738]

The first sign of incompetent leadership at any corporation is an abundance of orchestrator roles — project and program managers, scrum masters, and DTEs.

If you have those, there's a 99% chance your executives don't know how to build a functioning technology organization.

[Iggy @IR73682738]

This is what getting old feels like 🥲

[Iggy @IR73682738]

I think my three kids held some kind of a closed-door meeting recently, because every time we want to buy something nice for the house, they tell us to stop wasting money and set it aside for their college instead.

I blame the oldest. She's turning 16 this month.

[Iggy @IR73682738]

@henrydaubrez This is awesome, I'm going to try that with my kids tomorrow! What did you use?

[Iggy @IR73682738]

Just fed my second draft of "The Witch" to Fable 5 and asked for an editorial letter.

It shred it to pieces again, but the fixes I did after Sonnet's suggestion were generally good.

Again, the most heartwarming part of the feedback was this:

"The Old Troll — Best supporting character in the manuscript. His arc from menace to grudging dance partner is exactly the kind of redemption-without-domestication kids adore. Protect his prickliness at the feast; he should never become nice, only included. Olle giving him the cake is a lovely grace note."

This is why he got his own book, you know https://t.co/LOi50LtBBh

[Iggy @IR73682738]

This morning I ran an editorial analysis for "The Little Witch of Skoggeville" with Claude's Sonnet 4.6.

It took me 6 months to bring myself to do it. In many ways, it feels like I've finally gone through a surgery that I've been putting off for a while.

To no surprise, Claude hit all the point that I dreaded to confront - weak set-ups, incomplete resolutions and outright plot holes. However, it wasn't the part that got me most.

This was:

"The Old Troll is a scene-stealer — consider giving him slightly more page time. He is the funniest and most memorable secondary character. The dance scene at the Midsummer feast is a delight. Children will want more of him, and his relationship with Olle (the gnome who decides to befriend him) is a lovely, unexpected emotional thread."

Little does the model know that I've already published an entire book about those two, https://t.co/LOi50Lt3LJ

[Iggy @IR73682738]

@rnewton7777 This place looks familiar, pretty sure I've been there more than once.

[Iggy @IR73682738]

@TitaniasRealm John Bauer is an absolute legend. https://t.co/UA9QT0xqfZ

[Iggy @IR73682738]

I asked 8-yo to think of a pet she'd want to hang out with. This is what we got:

[Iggy @IR73682738]

It's hard to believe that Tove wrote many of her unbelievable magic books while being clinically depressed. The dark side of the genius.

[Titania @TitaniasRealm]

Cover illustration for Tales from Moominvalley by Tove Jansson (1981)