Jessica Kerr

  1. Fixing Without Understanding

    A while back, I washed a book in a load of laundry. It got all the way through the dryer before I realized what all this white stuff was. Ooops! I’ve been feeling bad for all the fuzz left in the dryer. Poor dryer. Maybe I can take its front off and scoop all that ... Read moreFixing Without Understanding

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  2. Augmented Coding: Better with Principles

    Today I opened the AWS console in order to transcribe a video, and I could not be bothered to do all that clicking. This has to be six lines in the terminal. I don’t know the six lines, but Claude does. Claude “automated the entire Amazon Transcribe workflow” in 300 lines of dependency checking, argument…

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  3. Augmented Coding: an Experience Report

    Last weekend I sat down with augmentcode.com to do some serious AI-assisted coding. The agent, “Auggie,” promises to automate coding tasks to a level I haven’t tried before. Gotta say, it was pretty good. I got farther than I would have alone. But hoooo, it is a new kind of effort and frustration. Overall…

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  4. Software development is…

    There is something puzzling about software development. It doesn’t work like many tasks, it doesn’t break down the same way. It feels strangely personal, like there’s a connection between the code and the coder, or else it goes brittle. Today I learned a word for this! Ursula Franklin was a physicist…

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  5. The world is terrible and great

    Not only can things be otherwise, they already are, and it is a matter of tuning, tending, activating, connecting, and defending these processes of change that are already in the making. Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, Joyful Militancy Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2025. The system is broken…

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  6. Cascading OKRs: We can do Better

    OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) are a framework for validating alignment through the organization. As a company, as a department, as a team: what are we focused on this quarter? What are we trying to make true? Alignment looks nice when the team OKRs roll up to the department OKRs, and those add up to…

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  7. Hitting OKRs vs Doing Your Job

    In Engineering, quarterly OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) can feel like a duplication of product planning. Basically, they say “Ship the Roadmap.” What new information are they communicating in that case? And if the OKRs say anything else, they’re in conflict the roadmap! An example (that I made up)…

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  8. OKRs for Evil and Good

    My work does not reduce to measurable outcomes. Much of what I accomplish as an engineer and as a developer advocate amounts to creating conditions that make it more likely for the company to succeed. I resist and resent most metrics, yet I don’t mind OKRs the way Honeycomb does them. How not to OKR…

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  9. Productivity v Impact

    Here’s a familiar 2×2, the Important & Urgent quadrants: Very early in my career, I was taught to beware the “Not Important & Urgent” quadrant. I’m used to working in the “Important & Urgent” quadrant most of the time, getting the important stuff done just on time. This is the quadrant of productivity…

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  10. Why is every startup’s website so darn useless?

    I don’t think I’ve worked at a company whose website satisfied me. It never gives me a clear explanation of what our product does. After a few years working closely with Marketing, I finally understand why. As a developer, my goal is to provide useful capabilities to people through the software I work…

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