https://andrewshell.org

Andrew Shell's WeblogStrategies for thinking, learning, and productivity.Andrew Shell's Weblog Andrew Shell's Weblog Strategies for thinking, learning, and productivity. Andrew Shell's Weblog Hi!, I'm Andrew Shell a Senior Web Engineer from Madison, WI. I'm a software developer, writer, and community builder passionate about open-source technology and collaboration. Welcome to my weblog! Here you'll find my essays and quick updates. Check out my notes for technical documentation. You can also learn more about me and what I'm up to now. Subscribe via RSS. Recent Posts So far, my time at PetPlace has been a whirlwind. Although I was hired as a senior dev and have been contributing a lot of code, I've gradually moved into a more leadership role. It became increasingly clear that, due to the team composition, there needed to be a strong tech lead to keep things moving in the right direction. Quickly, I was named the lead for 24PetShelter and have been working not only as a bridge between the product and engineering teams, architecting new features, and also working closely one-on-one with other developers, helping mentor and brainstorm the work. I’m told my official job title will be updated in the new year to align with the responsibilities I’ve been undertaking. One challenge that I’ve been struggling with is our new use of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), which has a lot of similarities with Scrum, but with the added component of Program Increments or PIs. A PI is an 8-12 week cycle in which you commit to certain features; the work itself is still broken into two-week iterations (sprints). The difficulty is that architecting the features requires significant pre-work. The product team does research and has their own planning meetings to identify the features they want to work on, then they pull together what the requirements for the feature will be, then I get involved and work closely with the product owner and the UX designer to start figuring out what the actual flows and deliverables will be. So I’m scrambling to architect features that are sometimes in flux right up to the last minute before we need to start the next PI. We’ve only been through two PIs so far, and we’re planning for the third PI right now. I’m optimistic we’ll figure out the systems so I can start architecting things sooner and have more time to plan. Some weeks, I’m completely overwhelmed. December 16, 2025 updates In August, I paused my Keto diet. I was traveling a lot with my daughter for summer vacation, and you might be surprised to find it's hard to eat Keto at Circus World. I had plateaued and been out of ketosis for over three months (since the new job), so I'm guessing it's related to cortisol. My plan was to restart once she started school again in September, but I haven't. It's disheartening because I've regained about 40 lbs from where I was in August. I started the diet back in October 2024, the Monday before Halloween. Maybe that's a good time to restart and recommit to my diet. October 16, 2025 updates Defending Speech We Disagree With Just about a week ago, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during one of his college debates. Since then, a war has erupted between people who celebrated his death (or said they thought he had it coming) and those who believe that political violence is never acceptable. I've had a... Read more → September 16, 2025 essays For the last few weeks, I've been playing around with Claude Code and have found it to be very useful. In particular, I've been leveraging it to modernize my RSS Cloud Server project, which has been on the back burner for several years. It's very much AI-assisted and not "Vibe Coding" because I know specifically what I want to be improved, and I'm running everything through my extensive tests and doing code reviews. It's allowing me to take months of work and compress it into hours. The biggest variable is that I'm so stretched with my new job that I haven't had the mental bandwidth for side projects. Using Claude Code has allowed me to start checking things off my to-do list and giving myself more margin. June 27, 2025 updates I decided to share my ThothGPT System Prompt which I'll keep updated as it changes and evolves. I've been using a variation of this prompt, first with ChatGPT and now with Claude for several months. It has been an indespensible tool in my recent journey of self development. I could see myself writing a mini-book and/or video tutorial about my journaling process. If this seems interesting, please reach out. June 13, 2025 updates See all essays → | See all notes → | Search → © 2025, Built with 11ty Social: RSS Twitter Mastodon GitHub Gravatar ← An IndieWeb Webring 🕸💍 → ← Fediring →enenhttps://andrewshell.org

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