Alexander van Eck

Well.. I managed! I took Reeling In The Years by Steely Dan and listened to it a lot, and I mean a lot.. After 3 days of listening and picking out notes, chords and arrangement I was able to start capturing it with midi in Logic. To my own surprise it doesn't sound half bad.

Over the past few weeks I've been looking at music again. It's been a while since I dove this deep. For some reason music keeps pulling me back both in listening but also in writing. I have this image of myself being a musician, composing my own pieces and ultimately performing them. However, the difficulty with this image is that I have never actually written any pieces.

Lately it's becoming increasingly clear that the product I work on is not designed to be easy to code in. I've been thinking about what the actual problem is that slows us down regularly. I think what's going on that it was not designed for changing assumptions at all. The codebase grew organically over the last five years and most implementations are more 'this works' than 'this is right', and that's exactly what's tripping us up.

Like many other engineers I do a lot of code review every week. At my current place of work we require at least 1 approval before work is allowed to be merged. Last week I received a code review request which involved adding a JSONField to an API. The interaction was memorable and ended in the merge request being closed in favour of a different approach. I wanted to record it here to refer back to it in the future.

A couple of years ago I quit my job to pursue my own business full-time. At the time I had an online side-business that I felt wasn't growing because I was spending too much time at my day job. In hindsight the project would never have worked out, especially when large multi-million competitors moved into the space. However, when I resigned my boss invited me to have dinner with him and his business partner.