Posts on Jens Rantil

A classic xkcd comic. ([source](https://xkcd.com/386/)) A while ago, someone was wrong on the Internet, and it got me triggered1. 😄 A LinkedIn post asked whether small PRs are only justified for hotfixes, or if they have broader value, and what the maximum number of changed files should be before a PR gets pushed back for splitting.

A classic xkcd comic. ([source](https://xkcd.com/386/)) A while ago, someone was wrong on the Internet, and I couldn’t let it go1. 😄 A LinkedIn post asked whether small PRs are only justified for hotfixes, or if they have broader value, and what the maximum number of changed files should be before a PR gets pushed back for splitting.

Here is a small tip that has saved me a lot of time: Always log your entire parsed configuration when your service or application boots. Or at least, support logging it through a verbose logging level. In practice, this can be logging the entire parsed YAML structure1, your config struct, or all the variables you have set from environment variables. No matter how you load your configuration, log it (but mask your secrets).

I think many companies could use a formal learning review process for non-mutual employee departures. A “non-mutual departure” could be initiated by either party in an employment relationship, either by the employee or the employer. What they have in common is that one side is unhappy. Maybe the company was unhappy with the employee’s performance. Or maybe the employee left after 12 months because the job was not a good fit.

I think many companies could use a formal learning review process for non-mutual employee departures. A “non-mutual departure” could be initiated by either party in an employment relationship, either by the employee or the employer. What they have in common is that one side is unhappy. Maybe the company was unhappy with the employee’s performance. Or maybe the employee left after 12 months because the job was not a good fit.

In April, I published the article “What type of AI usage?” In it, I observed that many companies could use a slightly more outcome-driven approach to AI to improve their impact. No tool is great in itself; it needs to solve a problem. This is utilitarianism – and it applies equally to AI, which is a tool. The Industry strikes back Link to heading After publishing my article, a good friend reached out. This friend warned me that criticizing AI could “negatively impact my career”.

These past years, I have had a lot of people reaching out and wanting to talk “AI” (or LLMs) with me. Either the AI conversations have been around AI strategy for themselves, or for their company. Sometimes they have worked for a company claiming to be “AI first”. Assuming that the conversation is about customer impact (which “AI usage” is not1), my first question is always “What type of AI usage are we talking about here?”

I was once assigned as the onboarding buddy for my then-new colleague Jeff. I had been at the company for five years and was almost a founding engineer. I knew the ins and outs of the company. Not only did I mostly know the way we worked, our company culture, our technical stack, and our design choices, but, more importantly, I had the history and context of how things came to be.

Code freezes commonly stirs up strong emotions within the engineering community. Either people find them useful, or hate them. Some companies have a code freeze on Fridays, others do it over the December holidays, or around important dates when systems must be extra stable, such as Black Friday. Code freeze? Link to heading In short, a code freeze is when changes to a software system are suspended to make it more stable. But the devil is in the details:

The term AI is everywhere these days. Suddenly, it feels like every single company frontpage on the Internet says it is either “an AI company” or “using AI to do X”. It is as if the whole world has discovered that computers can do smart things. But let me tell you what feels like a little secret these days: AI has been around since the 1950s. In 1950, Alan Turing published “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, introducing the Turing Test and seriously framing the question of whether machine...