Will Larson's Blog

Since joining Imprint a bit over six months ago as the CTO of a ~50 engineer team,I’ve merged 104 pull requests, which is slightly over four per week. Many of them are very minimalconfiguration and documentation tweaks, and none were the hardest or even most time-sensitive task availableat any given time; I’m much more of a pull request scavenger finding opportunities that don’tdisrupt the operating teams’ rhythms.

That said, a decent chunk represent meaningful software development tasks, an...

As I get older, I increasingly think aboutwhether I’m spending my time the right wayto advance my career and my life.This is also a question that your companyasks about you every performance cycle:is this engineering manager spending theirtime effectively to advance the company or their organization?

Confusingly, in my experience, answering these nominally similar questionshas surprisingly little in common.This piece spends some time exploring both questions in the particularlyodd momen...

On November 3rd, 2023, I posted Thoughts on writing and publishing Primerto celebrate the completion of my work on my prior book, The Engineering Executive’s Primer.Three weeks later, I posted Engineering strategy notes on November 21st, 2023,as I started to pull together thoughts to write my upcoming book, Crafting Engineering Strategy.

Those initial thoughts turned into my first chapter draft, How should you adopt LLMs? on May 14th, 2024.Writing continued all the way through the Stripe API...

Last weekend, I wrote a bit about using Zapier to load Notion pages as prompts to comment on other Notion pages.That worked well enough, but not that well.This weekend I spent some time getting the next level of this working,creating an agent that runs as an AWS Lambda.This, among other things, allowed me to rely on agent tool usageto support both page and block-level comments, and altogether I thinkthe idea works extremely well.

This was mostly implemented by Claude Code,and I think the ...

One of my side quests at work is to get a simple feedback loopgoing where we can create knowledge bases that comment on Notion documents.I was curious if I could hook this together following these requirements:

No custom code hostingPrompt is editable within Notion rather than requiring understanding of ZapierShould be be fairly quickly

Ultimately, I was able to get it working.So a quick summary of how it works,some comments on why I don’t particularly like this approach,then some more ...

For managers who have spent a long time reporting to a specific leader or working in an organization with well‑understood goals, it’s easy to develop skill gaps without realizing it. Usually this happens because those skills were not particularly important in the environment you grew up in. You may become extremely confident in your existing skills, enter a new organization that requires a different mix of competencies, and promptly fall on your face.

There are a few common varieties of this, bu...

I’m turning forty in a few weeks, and there’s a listicle archetype along the lines of“Things I’ve learned in the first half of my career as I turn forty and havenow worked roughly twenty years in the technology industry.”How do you write that and make it good?Don’t ask me. I don’t know!

As I considered what I would write to summarize my career learnings so far,I kept thinking about updating my post Advancing the industryfrom a few years ago, where I described using that concept as a north ...

There’s a lot of excitement about what AI (specifically the latest wave of LLM-anchored AI) can do,and how AI-first companies are different from the prior generations of companies.There are a lot of important and real opportunities at hand, but I find that many of these conversationsoccur at such an abstract altitude that they border on meaningless.Sort of like saying that your company could be much better if you merely adopted more software. That’s certainly true,but it’s not a particularl...

Over the past 19 months, I’ve written Crafting Engineering Strategy,a book on creating engineering strategy. I’ve also been working increasingly withlarge language models at work.Unsurprisingly, the intersection of those two ideas is a topic that I’ve been thinkingabout a lot. What, I’ve wondered, is the role of the author, particularly the long-form author,in a world where an increasingly large percentage of writing is intermediated bylarge language models?

One framing I’ve heard somewhat...

Since 2020, I’ve been working on my desk setup, and I think I finallyhave it mostly pulled together at this point. I don’t really thinkmy desk setup is very novel, and I’m sure there are better ways to pullit together, but I will say that it finally works the way I wantsince I added the CalDigit TS5 Plus,which has been a long time coming.

My requirements for my desk are:

Has support for 2-3 Mac laptopsHas support for a Windows gaming desktop with a dedicated GPUHas a dedicated microphone...