Coffee on the Keyboard
  • Home
  • jamessocol.com
Sign in Subscribe

May You Always

James Socol

06 Jan 2007

Happy New Year!

I doubt many people read this, but if you do, have a good January.

Sign up for more like this.

Enter your email
Subscribe
Photo of an inverted red cross and heart symbol on a white-painted metal plate.

Discomfort Needs Safety

Growth requires discomfort. Whether that's growing pains as a child, or uncomfortable conversations and feedback, we have to confront and address an existing, comfortable reality, and explore something beyond it. By definition, going out of our comfort zone is, well, uncomfortable. So if you want growth, you need
22 Aug 2025 2 min read
Photo of metal letters on a shelf with neon lights inside spelling out "SALE"

Zero-cost Future Proofing: Meaningful Namespaces

Sandi Metz famously said "duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction," and my experience has been that following that advice has usually worked out well. You can't future-proof well until you know what you need to future-proof against. A trade-off that makes thing A easier
09 May 2025 3 min read
Photo of a statue of a see-saw installed in a park. The riders' sizes are comically different.

Have More Impact by Doing the Right Work

Writing code—no matter how much, how fast, or how challenging—is not the same thing as having impact on a business. As engineers, we're rarely taught how to think about and describe the work we do in terms of its impact or effects. We're left
27 Jan 2025 5 min read
Coffee on the Keyboard © 2025
Powered by Ghost