Jeff H
@capn-thundersleet.bsky.social
"And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is." -- Granny Weatherwax.
Terry Pratchett, "Carpe Jugulum."
Terry Pratchett, "Carpe Jugulum."
I've spent a ton of time on software architecture at all my various appointments over the years. One thing I've learned is how to build services that evolve, that last, and can be quickly understood by developers new to a given project. jeffersonheard.ghost.io/lesso-on-mic...
How I design backend services
CQRS is often associated with microservices and event-sourcing, but it stands alone as an excellent alternative to MVC design.
jeffersonheard.ghost.io
August 1, 2025 at 12:32 PM
I've spent a ton of time on software architecture at all my various appointments over the years. One thing I've learned is how to build services that evolve, that last, and can be quickly understood by developers new to a given project. jeffersonheard.ghost.io/lesso-on-mic...
No-one tells you this, but there's really *one* clear goal for the first few months after any acquisition that you intend to keep running: Show your acquired users and your new development team that there's real value for them in being a part of your company. jeffersonheard.ghost.io/so-you-bough...
So you bought a tech company, now what?
Part 1 of 2
jeffersonheard.ghost.io
June 18, 2025 at 3:25 PM
No-one tells you this, but there's really *one* clear goal for the first few months after any acquisition that you intend to keep running: Show your acquired users and your new development team that there's real value for them in being a part of your company. jeffersonheard.ghost.io/so-you-bough...
Reposted by Jeff H
leftists: that thing you teach us in school to be terrified of is happening
historians: that thing is definitely happening
star wars: here is a beat-for-beat breakdown of how the thing happens, but with pew pew lasers. we know you watched it
news outlets: these protesters are out of control
historians: that thing is definitely happening
star wars: here is a beat-for-beat breakdown of how the thing happens, but with pew pew lasers. we know you watched it
news outlets: these protesters are out of control
June 11, 2025 at 12:34 PM
leftists: that thing you teach us in school to be terrified of is happening
historians: that thing is definitely happening
star wars: here is a beat-for-beat breakdown of how the thing happens, but with pew pew lasers. we know you watched it
news outlets: these protesters are out of control
historians: that thing is definitely happening
star wars: here is a beat-for-beat breakdown of how the thing happens, but with pew pew lasers. we know you watched it
news outlets: these protesters are out of control
If I never have to read the all-capsed (or not) phrase "THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER" again it will be too soon. Does he really think his Truth Social diarrhea is the equivalent of a letter from legal counsel? It's such an odd (and offputting) verbal tic.
June 11, 2025 at 2:55 PM
If I never have to read the all-capsed (or not) phrase "THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER" again it will be too soon. Does he really think his Truth Social diarrhea is the equivalent of a letter from legal counsel? It's such an odd (and offputting) verbal tic.
Over 10% of adults have ADHD, but ADHD is not part of accessibility standards or best practices. Design and engineering for ADHD accessibility is actually just good conscientious design. It helps everyone, not just people affected by ADHD and will naturally result in better retention, CSAT and NPS.
Interruptions and Garden Paths
An overlooked aspect of accessibility.
jeffersonheard.ghost.io
June 9, 2025 at 6:04 PM
Over 10% of adults have ADHD, but ADHD is not part of accessibility standards or best practices. Design and engineering for ADHD accessibility is actually just good conscientious design. It helps everyone, not just people affected by ADHD and will naturally result in better retention, CSAT and NPS.
It seems at least two people on the internet need more social anxiety than they have. I have plenty to spare and am more than willing to offer it up.
June 6, 2025 at 2:12 AM
It seems at least two people on the internet need more social anxiety than they have. I have plenty to spare and am more than willing to offer it up.
There's a good chance you have engineers right now spending time and energy on problems that have already been solved by someone else. Figure out why people aren't asking for the right tools, and put more engineering energy on your core business problems.
Build or Buy. Grind or Automate.
One thing I like to ask in diligence is how people in engineering and product judge the value of third-party software purchases. Sometimes these are buy vs. build decisions, but in others an engineer ...
jeffersonheard.ghost.io
June 3, 2025 at 12:49 PM
There's a good chance you have engineers right now spending time and energy on problems that have already been solved by someone else. Figure out why people aren't asking for the right tools, and put more engineering energy on your core business problems.
I often say you should model your data last. What I haven't said is what that modeling should look like. In this post I talk about what I've learned about data modeling in more than a decade of SaaS work. jeffersonheard.ghost.io/modeling-dat...
Modeling data well
I talk often about how modeling data should be done later in the process. If you start a new project with a models.py or com.mycompany.models.* or models/*.rb then you're putting the cart before the h...
jeffersonheard.ghost.io
May 12, 2025 at 6:54 PM
I often say you should model your data last. What I haven't said is what that modeling should look like. In this post I talk about what I've learned about data modeling in more than a decade of SaaS work. jeffersonheard.ghost.io/modeling-dat...
Reposted by Jeff H
Everyone in the past was neurotypical, which is how we got things like this single-author, eight-volume encyclopedia of ferns
May 6, 2025 at 1:20 PM
Everyone in the past was neurotypical, which is how we got things like this single-author, eight-volume encyclopedia of ferns
Reposted by Jeff H
The possibility that RFK Jr. is going to undermine herd immunity in the United States grows increasingly likely.
This would mean that US will be responsible for starting numerous pandemics and potentially destroying the effectiveness of the entire globe’s vaccine arsenal.
This is bioterrorism.
This would mean that US will be responsible for starting numerous pandemics and potentially destroying the effectiveness of the entire globe’s vaccine arsenal.
This is bioterrorism.
May 2, 2025 at 12:04 AM
The possibility that RFK Jr. is going to undermine herd immunity in the United States grows increasingly likely.
This would mean that US will be responsible for starting numerous pandemics and potentially destroying the effectiveness of the entire globe’s vaccine arsenal.
This is bioterrorism.
This would mean that US will be responsible for starting numerous pandemics and potentially destroying the effectiveness of the entire globe’s vaccine arsenal.
This is bioterrorism.
Oh look, appeasement, sanewashing, and "balance" that made Trump v. Biden seem like an issue reasonable people could disagree on didn't save NPR. How surprising.
May 2, 2025 at 2:43 PM
Oh look, appeasement, sanewashing, and "balance" that made Trump v. Biden seem like an issue reasonable people could disagree on didn't save NPR. How surprising.
About the current #WorldCon kerfuffle. I read the statement. From my reading it looked reasonable. The way my partner read it, it wasn't. It's a bad statement. @seattlein2025.org, just show us the process. Vet the conchair as a panelist. Then show the prompt, the application, and the results.
May 1, 2025 at 2:50 PM
About the current #WorldCon kerfuffle. I read the statement. From my reading it looked reasonable. The way my partner read it, it wasn't. It's a bad statement. @seattlein2025.org, just show us the process. Vet the conchair as a panelist. Then show the prompt, the application, and the results.
We just recreated a scene from Aliens with the cats. It was everything it could be.
April 30, 2025 at 1:30 PM
We just recreated a scene from Aliens with the cats. It was everything it could be.
100 days.
100 days of lies, insults, injuries, and atrocities. 100 days of economic suicide. 100 days of dismantling. 100 days of grift. 100 days of extortion. 100 days of teach-the-controversy from the news media. 100 days of cowardice from Congress, who could end this.
100 days.
100 days of lies, insults, injuries, and atrocities. 100 days of economic suicide. 100 days of dismantling. 100 days of grift. 100 days of extortion. 100 days of teach-the-controversy from the news media. 100 days of cowardice from Congress, who could end this.
100 days.
April 30, 2025 at 1:25 PM
100 days.
100 days of lies, insults, injuries, and atrocities. 100 days of economic suicide. 100 days of dismantling. 100 days of grift. 100 days of extortion. 100 days of teach-the-controversy from the news media. 100 days of cowardice from Congress, who could end this.
100 days.
100 days of lies, insults, injuries, and atrocities. 100 days of economic suicide. 100 days of dismantling. 100 days of grift. 100 days of extortion. 100 days of teach-the-controversy from the news media. 100 days of cowardice from Congress, who could end this.
100 days.
Two of the most common tarpits in creating software boil down to the fear that you're not creating enough value without including *everything*, imagining *every* possibility, and planning for gargantuan scale. jeffersonheard.com/avoiding-tec...
Avoiding Technology Tarpits: Ontology and Taxonomy
Avoid, avoid, avoid starting a project by modeling your data in an ORM. Why? Because the temptation in data modeling is to model the "thing" perfectly instead of prioritizing your model by utility wit...
jeffersonheard.com
April 29, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Two of the most common tarpits in creating software boil down to the fear that you're not creating enough value without including *everything*, imagining *every* possibility, and planning for gargantuan scale. jeffersonheard.com/avoiding-tec...
Another article on software architecture principles for the EM, VP, or CTO. The whole point of software architecture is the ability to adapt to market change. I talk about how to do that so that you're always building good software.
jeffersonheard.com/your-saass-m...
jeffersonheard.com/your-saass-m...
Your SaaS's most important trait is Evolvability
In the world of commercial SaaS, your technology is always on a trajectory to become generic. Competition catches up. Broader trends change the way software is meant to look, feel, and be used. The lo...
jeffersonheard.com
April 23, 2025 at 3:36 PM
Another article on software architecture principles for the EM, VP, or CTO. The whole point of software architecture is the ability to adapt to market change. I talk about how to do that so that you're always building good software.
jeffersonheard.com/your-saass-m...
jeffersonheard.com/your-saass-m...
jeffersonheard.com/what-i-talk-... - It's been a couple of years and I've learned a lot, so I've revised my article on how to handle tech debt as an engineering leader. This has been my post popular article by far, so I felt like it was time to freshen it up!
What I talk about when I talk about Technical Debt.
Communicating technical debt to people other than engineers is essential to getting work on that debt prioritized and valued alongside bugs and product roadmap work, and it’s not easy at all. One key ...
jeffersonheard.com
April 21, 2025 at 8:37 PM
jeffersonheard.com/what-i-talk-... - It's been a couple of years and I've learned a lot, so I've revised my article on how to handle tech debt as an engineering leader. This has been my post popular article by far, so I felt like it was time to freshen it up!
jeffersonheard.com/so-you-wanna... I’ve been at the engineering helm of 10 M&As over my career, I’m starting to write out what I’ve learned about #techdiligence.
So You Wanna Buy a Tech Company
I've run the tech side of the M&A playbook now I think 10 times. I want to talk to fellow tech executives who are looking at acquiring a company about tech diligence and what it's for.
In 2021 we bou...
jeffersonheard.com
April 18, 2025 at 7:48 PM
jeffersonheard.com/so-you-wanna... I’ve been at the engineering helm of 10 M&As over my career, I’m starting to write out what I’ve learned about #techdiligence.
Reposted by Jeff H
There’s a strain of person who would much rather believe that Americans aren’t doing anything to fight back than that they ARE fighting back and it hasn’t fixed things.
And look, I get it. It’s the same drive that says if you don’t bounce back from an illness, you must have done something wrong.
And look, I get it. It’s the same drive that says if you don’t bounce back from an illness, you must have done something wrong.
March 30, 2025 at 5:36 PM
There’s a strain of person who would much rather believe that Americans aren’t doing anything to fight back than that they ARE fighting back and it hasn’t fixed things.
And look, I get it. It’s the same drive that says if you don’t bounce back from an illness, you must have done something wrong.
And look, I get it. It’s the same drive that says if you don’t bounce back from an illness, you must have done something wrong.
I’ll accept arguments over the merits of Joel or Mike or Jonah or Emily, but Pearl Forrester is the best mad, hands down.
March 31, 2025 at 10:56 PM
I’ll accept arguments over the merits of Joel or Mike or Jonah or Emily, but Pearl Forrester is the best mad, hands down.
You want to bring back the 1950's? Fine. tableroq.substack.com/p/but-they-j...
January 31, 2025 at 6:53 PM
You want to bring back the 1950's? Fine. tableroq.substack.com/p/but-they-j...
So good to see Flow www.imdb.com/title/tt4772... nominated for best animated feature! I hope it wins. I don't think it's a shoe in, but it's certainly my favorite out of that lineup. I also loved The Wild Robot www.imdb.com/title/tt2962..., so I won't be sad if that takes it.
Flow (2024) ⭐ 7.9 | Animation, Adventure, Family
1h 25m | PG
www.imdb.com
January 23, 2025 at 9:29 PM
So good to see Flow www.imdb.com/title/tt4772... nominated for best animated feature! I hope it wins. I don't think it's a shoe in, but it's certainly my favorite out of that lineup. I also loved The Wild Robot www.imdb.com/title/tt2962..., so I won't be sad if that takes it.
First in my series on Production Python. I hate that no-one documents how to correctly connect your API project to an RDS-like database, so I've done it here. #python #fastapi #postgresql
Production Python 1: Setting up FastAPI to talk to a “real” database.
In which I talk about how to do real things in Python in real environments you might deploy to.
tableroq.substack.com
January 22, 2025 at 11:30 PM
First in my series on Production Python. I hate that no-one documents how to correctly connect your API project to an RDS-like database, so I've done it here. #python #fastapi #postgresql
Butt-ugly, but the air is clean and my whole house is a toasty 71ºF despite the bitter cold outside.
My new woodstoving accessory is the Corsi-Rosenthal Box
One butt-ugly DIY contraption serves to get soot out of the air AND helps the stove warm the whole house.
open.substack.com
January 20, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Butt-ugly, but the air is clean and my whole house is a toasty 71ºF despite the bitter cold outside.
Just learning my tools really. Walnut spatula with a Zelda BotW dragon motif. Gotta take breaks for carpal tunnel.
January 18, 2025 at 10:06 PM
Just learning my tools really. Walnut spatula with a Zelda BotW dragon motif. Gotta take breaks for carpal tunnel.