Forem: Dr. Josh C. Simmons

Stop Writing 50-Page Reports No One Reads

Dr. Josh C. Simmons — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 16:22:18 +0000

I listened to Kublai Khan TX's most excellent album Nomad while writing this essay.

Consider Your Audience

The modern attention span is extremely short. You cannot change this fact. There are two paths that most people take when presenting their ideas:

My ideas are special and demand longer sustained attention.
I will distill the essence of my idea and package it for a short-attention-span audience.

I'm Special

Some ideas demand long-form. You're probably not working on one of these ideas at your job.

Prepare a long report or rambling email and you are either: not aware of the limitations of your audience, or, believe that you and your idea are somehow special - "Stop everything! I have something long-winded and visionary to say about how we're solving a solved problem!"

Building a CRUD app can be explained in one sentence. Changing a process can be explained with a few bullet points.

If you respect your audience, you will edit yourself aggressively - keeping the essence of your idea but packaging it neatly.

Edit

How much frivolous rambling was in the last email, powerpoint slide, or Slack message you wrote?

None at all you say? Here's how to truly find out: imagine the worst coworker you've ever in your career wrote your last email but you need the information it contains - does it seem fluffy when every second of reading it is pain? Now you know where you can tighten things up.

The best thing you can do for your audience isn't writing, it's deleting!

Ignore This Web Trend And You Will FAIL

Dr. Josh C. Simmons — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 17:30:32 +0000

The way web experiences work today has been dead for a long time. As more users begin to realize just how dead the web is, they will crave a new paradigm, they will crave real-time experiences.

The Current State

The web today primarily works in one direction - a user initiates some action like loading a page or clicking a button and data is returned to them.

Sure there are "push notifications" but mostly there are unhelpful, annoying, and cluttered. They are one of the biggest UX-fuckups since Google started prioritizing ads over helpful search. Notifications are shit and they are intrusive.

Pain Point

People whine that modern user experiences are "shortening our attention spans".

There's a bit of truth to this. I probably watch hundreds of seconds-long Instagram Reels while I'm doing my zone 2 cardio on the treadmill. What the statement misses though is the root cause.

Root Cause

Why are we craving faster-iterating, shorter-duration interaction with content?

Simple.

It's closer to reality.

Pretend you and I are playing a game of catch (don't worry I'll give you a catcher's mask). You are the client and I am the server. A sequence of events unfolds:

You throw me the ball (user initiates an event)
I catch the ball
I think about how hard or gentle to throw the ball back (business logic, crunching the numbers)
I decide to throw you a 90MPH fastball (must be a grumpy day for me!)
You catch it (user receives data, in this case, slightly painful)

Between 01 and 05 on the web, you're just sitting there with your thumb up your ass. Maybe there's a loading spinner or something to keep you mildly entertained.

This downtime is now unacceptable to modern users!

Between 01 and 05 in our real-world catch example, you're receiving a ton of visual stimuli to keep you busy and engaged in the experience. You're observing my catch, as I think about how to throw the ball back you see my brow furrow and think, "he looks weirdly angry, is he going to throw a fastball?", as I wind up to throw your brain is working to calculate the angle and speed of the ball's arrival. Even if you look passive from the outside, your mind is extremely active and engaged even while you aren't holding the ball.

New Way

Users will gravitate towards the real-time web and leave the old, dead web.

Modern user experience must be real-time. This means everything must be streamed. The entire application architecture must be built with this in mind. Today's tooling is nascent but it always is in the first stage of any technological paradigm change.

Examples

These are just a few examples of how this is being done well.

Anduril

Most tech people clutch their pearls when thinking of how tech might be used by the defense industry. While a full refutation of the idiocy embodied by that stance is exceeds the scope of this article, I will remind readers that most notable technological advancements come from the defense industry. Ever used SQLite in a project? Invented at General Dynamics for the Navy.

I had a front-row seat watching Anduril's Lattice user experience change and grow over time when I worked there. Obviously no live demos available but you can see a demo on YouTube.

The defense startup space is HOT right now so I wouldn't be surprised if we see engineers rotating out of places like Anduril, Palantir, Saronic, Vannevar Labs, etc. to more public-facing companies and bringing some of the philosophy behind real time user experiences with them. Speaking from experience, once you see the kind of experience a real-time system provides the user, you want to bring that level of interactivity to other domains.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT's voice interface is another useful model. Although the AI isn't good enough to be extremely useful yet, the interface is great. Talking and listening are real-time experiences. The room for improvement in this case would be making the experience more multimedia rich. Right now there's an audio-reactive dot on the screen.

The naive implementation would be to have a computer-generated talking face on the screen.

The creative implementation would be to spatially visualize the thoughts and references that the AI is pulling from as it thinks and speaks its response.

Real life is happening right now, not 200ms from now. Ignore this and nobody will use your app a few years from now.

How New Grads Can Land a High-Paid Tech Job in 2025

Dr. Josh C. Simmons — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 22:50:23 +0000

Starting a tech career is more challenging than ever and if you're a new grad you might feel hopeless about your prospects. In reality, this field is abundant and anyone can get into it.

A friend of a friend got in touch recently asking for advice on how to get started after college. I've generalized that advice and put it here in short-form! Keep these simple things in mind and you'll land well.

How To Do College

Don't hyperfixate on what there is to do in college, instead, focus your mind on the negative space.

Strive to do reasonably well in your college courses. Most employers aren't going to care about your GPA if you have other achievements to talk about. Keep up with your coursework but don't go above and beyond unless a class or project is highly relevant to your career (or very interesting to you).

That might look like doing the bare minimum to pass your language requirement and that's okay.

The negative space in college is your free time. Aside from the regular good-to-have pursuits like friends and romantic interests, squirrel away some time to hack on coding projects - preferably with friends.

At best you can turn an idea into a startup. At worst, you learn how coding is actually done when it meets reality. This alone puts you very far ahead of most CS grads who largely have theoretical knowledge.

Grad School?

Nope*!

* With two exceptions...

MBA at Stanford GSB, Wharton, or HBS. Getting an MBA outside of these programs will cost you a lot in student loans and won't meaningfully accelerate your career past your peers who learned on the job.
You're going to pursue a Ph.D. in a field that hires a lot of Ph.D.s and compensates them well.

There is no reason to get a Master's degree unless it's to pursue #2.

Ignoring me on the above is gonna end in one of two ways: you end up a butthurt middle manager with a second-rate MBA who still thinks they can be a CEO someday OR you end up teaching as an adjunct part-time lecturer at Oshkosh Community College mad at the world because it doesn't pay you for being smart (and to a degree you'd be right).

If this sounds particularly condescending, I almost ended up as that adjunct lecturer but admitted to myself that I made some bad decisions and changed course. It's never too late but if you're in college, just take this info up front and avoid the heartbreak!

Resume

Most senior engineers are clueless when it comes to putting together a resume. If they're clueless, new grads are hopeless!

Get your resume looked over by someone that does hiring for tech companies. Reach out on my Contact Form with an anonymized resume and I'll do this for free on my YouTube channel. You need another set of eyes because you have no idea what hiring managers are looking for yet.

Bonus points, if the person reviewing your resume thinks you're worth your salt they might refer you to companies in their network.

Flexibility Advantage - WLB, Stack, and Location

When you finish up college you'll be, at best, a shitty engineer. That's where we all start from.

What do you have that the staff engineer with 15 years of experience doesn't have? You have youth and all of the benefits that come with it. You can take an absolute beating in your youth and come out okay. If you're competing with people that have families and other constraints on their time and energy, you have a huge advantage.

Some specific advantages you're likely to have:

WLB: You can work stupid hours in your twenties and you should at the beginning of your career.
Stack: It's not like you're extremely virtuosic in any given stack yet so the world is your oyster, you'll be learning something on the job so why not try a new one?
Location: You're likely pretty unattached which makes it very easy for you to move anywhere, especially high-opportunity places that are hard to live with families like NYC.

Don't Get Exploited Though

Consider the first 5 years of your career as paid grad school. Here's the contract for your early career employers:

You

Move across the country
Grind insane hours
Learn new technologies really fucking quickly

Employer

Gives you excellent, marketable job experience
Treats you with basic human dignity
Tosses you an interesting/odd-shaped problem every now and then
Gives you benefits, pays enough for living expenses, savings, and a bit of fun

You honor your side of the contract but also hold your employer accountable for honoring theirs. You are not slave labor nor should you be treated like it. Instead, you are receiving part of your pay in knowledge from what you're learning on the job. This is a temporary arrangement until you know enough to bring more value to the table at which point your should be compensated primarily in cash and secondarily in learning.

Best Tech Learnings of 2024

Dr. Josh C. Simmons — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 18:07:15 +0000

Let me save you the time - here's the best of what I learned in 2024.

Programming Languages/Frameworks

Ruby on Rails

If you need to build a REST API and have less than 1/2 a million users, you should use Ruby on Rails. Ruby has been improving, Rails has been improving. You get seeding, database, (the best) ORM, tests, and more for free, right out of the box. If you need a traditional REST API and you don't go with RoR you are either delusional about how successful your app will be or a dogmatist about some other language.

Next.js

Caveat - you only need a couple of lightweight endpoints or to abstract auth for some secondary API calls, Next.js is whatsup here. Even if you're not using many of Next's API-ish features, you get image optimization, server side rendering, granular control over server-rendered components loading states, and routing for FREE. If you're about to reach for React, just do the grownup thing instead and grab Next.

Astro

I rebuilt my blog in Astro this year. It would be a mistake to compare Astro to Next.js even though many do it. Astro is great for static sites. It doesn't compare to the breadth of Next's features for anything significantly more interactive though. Plus the .astro file format requires an additional LSP for your editor. If you're about to reach for Hexo/Hugo/raw CSS/HTML, do yourself a favor and grab Astro.

Haskell

Haskell is the most useless language I learned this year. I will likely never use if for anything real. Why did I list it then? Learning Haskell changed the way I think about software. Haskell is a language that doesn't allow you to "bring your whole self" to the keyboard, it demands that you submit to its customs and traditions. To be fair, it does things the "right" way. Unfortunately though, this rigidity has prevented its widespread adoption. I love Haskell but it's like owning a beautiful classic car, it's a marvel of engineering harkening back to a time when we could actually build worthwhile things and think clearly as a society, but you're probably not going to drive it daily.

Articles

Understanding Team Effectiveness

Google research on teams at Google about what makes teams successful. Shocking conclusions!

Psychological Safety vs. High Standards: A Misunderstood Dynamic

You can have your cake and eat it too. I've worked in "high standards" environments where judgment and negative emotion reigned supreme. I've also worked in high psychological safety environments where the engineers were mediocre. You can have both if you view it and pursue it in the right way.

Books

Red Sky Mourning - Jack Carr

The latest in "The Terminal List" series. These books are essentially smut for men. Great revenge plot, gigapatriotism, lots of realistic combat scenes and of course all of the latest greatest tactical gear. These books aren't profound but they are extremely entertaining reads.

Master of the Senate - Robert Caro

I continued to make progress in Robert Caro's multi book biography series on Lyndon B. Johnson. These books are transformative and have helped me understand myself and other people a lot better. The series isn't about LBJ, it's about America and how we lost trust in the presidency. Nothing I can say has ever convinced someone to begin reading this series so I'll cap it by saying that you will enjoy it if you ever muster the energy to begin with The Path to Power, the first book in the series.

Movies

None. Despite watching many movies this year I didn't see anything really impressive.

Gear

iPad Air 6th Generation and Pencil Pro

I've largely moved away from paper for notetaking and begun using the Pencil with iPad Air. It contains all of my notebooks and reference material for my consulting work. I pair it with my mechanical keyboard when travelling for writing blogs and strategy documents. My only gripe is that I can't easily run Neovim with my full compliment of plugins on it (yet).

iPad Mini

I went full on Apple fanboy this year and also picked up an iPad Mini. This swaps with my large Air as a short notetaking device. What it's ideal for though is reading. The size makes it about the same as a paperback book and I find it very convenient on the go, while waiting during the day, or while on the go (especially in airplanes).

Duer Pants

I hate uncomfortable pants. I bought my first pair of Lululemon ABC (anti ball crushing) pants in 2019. I now refuse to wear pants that look ugly or are uncomfortable for me. Lulu's quality has unfortunately declined, a LOT since the pandemic. Their pants feel like parachute material now. I found Duer pants one day at REI. They have a heavy weight to them with thick fabric. They're extremely stretchy but don't look like it (ideal combo). I've had my first pair for about a year. It's still in good shape but one cuff is starting to frey a bit. The price tag is quite high but considering I've travelled extensively in them and typically wear them 2-3 times a week, I'm happy with the price point.

The 1 Technique That Makes Shopify Engineers Masters At System Design

Dr. Josh C. Simmons — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 18:32:03 +0000

You only need information and instinct to master system design.

Most engineers focus on memorizing information but never practice developing instinct. Instinct from real on-the-job experience takes decades to gain but Shopify uses a brilliant technique to condense this practice into mere months.

Focusing on instinct practice is essential to take your system design powers to the next level.

How To Know What Proper Instinct Looks Like

Even the best information makes shitty baklava if it's not executed with perfect technique.

My godmother makes the best baklava in the world. The recipe was handed down to her from her mother and, after some pleading, she sent it to me. At face value, baking baklava is simple, there are only about 5 ingredients required. How hard can it be? Turns out, extraordinarily hard. Everything about how those 5 ingredients are handled matters. I made countless batches of baklava and most of them came out soggy, too salty, or even with sloppy walnut distribution across the layers of phyllo dough.

Although I have never altered the quality, brand, or quantity of the 5 ingredients required, my baklava has gotten significantly better (still not nearly as good as my godmother's). Why?

While it's impossible to define what proper instinct looks like, you'll know it's developing when your end result improves even when the inputs are kept constant.

Practicing Instinct In The Real World Is Too Slow

It's impossible to quickly improve your system design instincts on the job.

A senior engineer may only work on one or two large-scale system design problems per-year. At a small startup, they'll work on more designs but these will never be put to the test of hyperscaling. At a large tech company, they'll work on less designs but they will be higher quality due to the scaling required.

Mastery of system design with either of those approaches could take decades. You need a shortcut to excel in your career fast.

Shopify's Brilliant System Design Technique

The CEO of Shopify, Tobi Lütke, gives his engineers $30 to buy a tool that improves system design instinct over the course of mere months. That tool is the game Factorio.

Factorio is a real-time strategy game where players build and manage complex factories to automate production processes. The goal is to gather resources, research technologies, and defend your factory from alien creatures while expanding your industrial empire.

Sound familiar?

Playing Factorio is fun. It is also extremely difficult.

The mission is so simple it can be expressed in one sentence, "build a rocket ship and leave this planet." Compare this with a typical system design question "design Spotify". Whether you're building a rocket or designing Spotify you will have to deal with the same challenges under pressure in real time. Here are just some of the parallels:

What if my client application drops their connection vs. what if the coal pipeline I set up is broken by alien attackers?
How should I partition my system across geographical regions vs. should I fabricate parts close to where I will use them or close to where their ingredients are mined?
How should I structure my database schema to support the app's use case vs. how should I structure my factories to support building a rocket ship?

Just as with baklava and system design, the component parts are simple, whether you're creating something with walnuts, conveyor belts, or Postgres. The meta skill you're practicing in all three of those pursuits is the instinct of system design.

The System Design Practice That Passes Interviews And Builds Resilient, Scalable Systems

You can dramatically improve your system design skills enough to pass an interview in just 1 month.

Simplify your approach and focus on information and instinct practice. For interview prep, spend 30 minutes practicing instinct by playing Factorio. To maximize the effects of this practice, do it before work in the morning. This will help you break your typical thought patterns. In the evening read Designing Data Intensive Applications.

This accelerated practice will empower you to crush a system design interview in just a month.

The Fastest Way To Get A Tech Job When Nobody Is Hiring

Dr. Josh C. Simmons — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 01:04:51 +0000

Cold-applying to tech jobs doesn’t work like it did pre-2020. Even if you have great referrals, headcount is down most places and your chances are slim-to-none, so how do you get a tech job fast?

Sneak In Through The Back Door

If the game is unwinnable, play a different game. You can’t control headcount numbers or the insane current applicant-to-position ratio. What you can do is position yourself much better than your adversaries who are also searching for a way in. I’m going to explain how to do this in three easy steps.

1. Infiltrate

Get a job working at a company whose main product is not tech but has a tech department. The ideal target for this strategy is a company sized somewhere between a startup and a mid-size public company. The objective is to get a position that is adjacent to tech and in the same building or on the same campus of the company’s tech department. Anything where you’re going to be using a computer somewhat is probably sufficient, even if it’s just fiddling with Excel spreadsheets all day.

2. Gather Intelligence

Spend the first 90 days getting good enough at your job. The goal here is to live up to the expectations, not make a name for yourself in that line of work. Once you’re at cruising altitude in your current role, start making connections in the tech department. As an aspiring engineer, product manager, etc. you should have a natural interest in what they’re doing. Listen to their problems. See if you can offer solutions. Be open about your interest in working in tech.

3. Say Yes

Opportunities will present themself if you’re plugged in socially. It might take a few days, it might take a few months, but they will materialize. Maybe your engineer friend needs some help writing tests, or your product manager buddy wants your feedback on some slides — give away your help graciously and for free, even if it “goes nowhere” you are getting real-world practice for the job you ultimately want.

Parlaying This Into A Job

Once the tech market picks back up one of two good things will happen to you if you’ve played this strategy right.

You will get a job offer to do product/eng/etc. work at your current company since you are a known quantity to them now.
You can polish up your resume with all of the product/eng/etc. tasks you’ve done on-the-job which will put you light years ahead of any other candidates without real world experience.

Why This Works Better Than Any Other Approach

In this market, skill isn’t enough, you must also have an astronomically high level of perceived credibility, i.e. “does this dude have a track record of doing the job we’re going to hire him for?” This approach builds your perceived credibility within your current company and also with other companies when expressed on your resume. Follow this approach and you will have job offers as soon as the market improves.

How I’m Handling Work During the COVID-19 Stay-at-Home Order

Dr. Josh C. Simmons — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 16:38:35 +0000

Luckily, as of this writing, I am employed. I’m a software developer so despite my company’s overall reticence to the idea, I have been working remotely for a number of weeks. I’m not sure how tenuous my position is with the current and future state of the economy. I have a number of friends that have lost their jobs and I know the latest unemployment figures are staggering. In terms of coping, the only thing I can offer input on is on how to work effectively while remote.

Sane Arrangements with SOs or Roommates

I live with my fiancée who is also now working from home. Being stuck in the same room with anyone 24/7 for an indefinite amount of time, regardless of relationship, is likely not good for that relationship, whether it be a spouse, friend, or acquaintance. Our solution has been to set up separate workstations in different rooms. We each work normal hours (8-5). We text each other as if we’re both at our physical workplaces during the day, and “meet up” for our lunch hour. This bit of manufactured normalcy allows us to keep some semblance of an ordinary day and is of the utmost importance in maintaining sanity.

Off Hours = Off Hours

A strange thing happens when a non-remote company goes remote - I've seen this phenomenon a couple of times prior to the pandemic, and every time the work shifts to remote, employees typically work far harder than when they are in-office. My idea on why this occurs is wide-ranging and the topic of another future article, but in summary, I theorize that there’s some cultural insecurity around “being busy” that drives employees to work flat out in order to “prove their worth”.

On a good (non-pandemic) day, software engineers aren't the most assertive people. If you’re the kind of worker that puts in 80 hours a week while working in-office, you’re going to have an uphill battle during remote. Reasoning will start to fly that it’s not a huge deal for you to hop on the computer at any hour, day or night, “What’s the big deal, you can’t go outside anyways?”. Everyone needs to decide for themselves what their non-negotiables are - if someone tries to negotiate with those, you don’t need to provide reasoning, you just say no. Of course you are then responsible for the consequences of that no. The good news is that if you’re fired over standing up for something that’s important to you, that position wasn’t a good fit for you anyways.

Managing Tech

Turning off your work phone at 5PM is a good start. If you’re responsible for company tech (Site Reliability Engineer, Dev, etc.) you might give your supervisor your direct line in case there is some kind of P1 issue - site down, revenue being seriously impacted, etc. Chances are you know what constitutes a P1 issue and what doesn’t, use your judgement.

My work computer also goes off at 5PM. This is how I typically operate in-office too, that way it has a fresh reboot every day. I have a personal computer that I work on personal projects on. Having that division is helpful for me.

Virtual Water Cooler

The most notable thing that goes away when going remote is office smalltalk. In one sense, this has been a massive relief. No more am I plagued by distractions while trying to work on a complex piece of code — my hatred of open office plans constitutes another post. In another sense, deep work must be broken up by social activity as it usually promotes deep background thinking. In order to alleviate this, I try to schedule chit-chat with other coworkers - usually around some non-work-related topic. I talked stock market with a coworker last week. When I came back to a coding problem I had been struggling with, the answer was obvious to me.

Move/Eat

Most of us are probably going to come out of this pandemic a few pounds heavier. If you’re working remote, your office is now just feet away from a bunch of your favorite foods. Plus eating while bored is fun! Two things have helped me curb these bad habits and keep good physical fitness.

Home Gym

Work with what you have. I have the following minimal setup:

50lb Kettlebell
Yoga Mat
Elastic Bands
Rock Climbing Holds

One of the keys to incentivizing myself to workout during this has been to set aside a space for it. Over the past weekend I mounted my rock climbing holds into a supporting beam in the garage. I’ve been parking my car outside and using the garage as a “gym”. Having the separate space has been a good disconnect from the office, or relaxing areas of our apartment.

If you don’t have a lot of space, you can decide that when you’re on your yoga mat, you are in the “gym”. I think having some kind of mental distinction is key.

Unless you have a serious home setup, you’re probably not going to be setting PRs, but you can keep a good baseline level of fitness even with just bodyweight movements.

Fasting

Practicing intermittent fasting for 20 hours a day (20:4) has helped me with overeating. I’m not good at portion control, so it’s simply easier for me to decide times of the day when I can and can’t eat. The black and white thinking allows me to more easily assert my willpower over the hunger.

Most Importantly: ☀️

Get out multiple times a day while the sun is up. Go for 10-15 minute walks. I've also been supplementing with large doses of vitamin D in addition to this, which has positive effects on mood and immunity.

On the weekends I try to get to the park and go on a longer hike. The doom-mongers will think that this is irresponsible. Despite what’s being reported on the media, I’ve found parks that are very empty of people - you may have to go on a scouting drive to find one, but I promise that if I can find them in the densely-populated LA area, you can likely find them near you. FWIW they’ve typically been the “less popular” ones even before the pandemic. You don’t need the most scenic vista, just some room to roam and reconnect with nature.

That’s all I have on working from home tips for the pandemic. Stay safe, stay employed, stay healthy, but above all, stay true to yourself.