Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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— Kunal
I started at TML this Monday to work across different parts of infrastructure (and pick up ML whenever I get the chance). It's been a delight to explore and learn from the decisions of a really strong team, and to explore the infrastructure and abilities available. Within the first week, I landed some code that would have been a sev if it wasn't gated to my username, and tentatively helped prevent a different sev as well.
Joining a smaller company has been a treat; as I've been told -- and I'm finally experiencing several times over -- "You Can Just Do Things".
My onboarding speed and productivity would have been significantly reduced without Claude and Codex: they definitely make it easier to start ramping up, but don't particularly prevent n00b mistakes.
Claude is amazing at making themes on demand across different surfaces: I really enjoy pointing Claude to some of the paintings with colors I enjoyed and ask for a theme; as a result I now have 4 new custom themes whipped up in 15 minutes that I generally really enjoy using. Particularly one based on Horizon Chaude by Lam.
With all the changes going on in my life I'm running a bit behind on publishing a monthly essay: I have 2 going on in my head at the moment, How I write Python and a career review on what I've learned over the past several years at Meta.
Writing about what I learned at work is mostly for closure as I move to the next job and settle in completely -- and also summarize advice I find myself giving repeatedly to newer engineers. Writing about Python is something I can tentatively feed into Claude to get code that matches my style and design sensibilities faster instead of having to rewrite everything, and to consolidate my Python skills somewhat.
I really want to delve into more technical work though, so I'll have to think about this and explore what to write about and build.
More plane rides, and I ended up picking up Kill It With Fire again; which is an amazing book for bringing about change in large organizations with a carefully thought through, designed approach, and several memorable quotes.
It is an article of faith among experienced system designers that given any system design, someone someday will find a better one to d the same job. In other words, it is misleading and incorrect to speak of the design for a specific job, unless this is understood in the context of space, time, knowledge, and technology. -- Conway