The Curious Engineer

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jacobian.org

jacobian.org

Software / engineering practiceSecurityPythonEssays / personal

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
322 from 15 Aug 2005 to 12 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (7 in the last year)
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personal blog
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https://jacobian.org/index.xml

2026 6

  1. You Can't Change Your Boss
  2. First Aid Kits: Bleeding Control & Tourniquets
  3. 🔗 Recommendations When Using LLM-backed Generative AI Systems for FOSS Contributions
  4. This isn't a post about eating meat
  5. TIL: My Immich Setup
  6. 🔗 A beginner's guide to improving your digital security

2025 21

  1. How I'm voting in the 2026 DSF Board Elections
  2. Working in Between Public and Private
  3. 🔗 Writing a risk scenario
  4. 🔗 FACETS - Avalanche.org
  5. 🔗 This World of Ours (James Mickens)
  6. Two Scenario Threat Modeling
  7. Comfort Scores: A risk mitigation tool for pre-trip briefings
  8. 🔗 Using AI to build a tactical shooter
  9. 🔗 Developing our position on AI - Blog - Recurse Center
  10. What if We Thought About Risk Decisions Differently?
  11. Ultralight Heresies
  12. 🔗 Evan Reese - Custom OnShape features
  13. TIL: 3d printed parts have different strength characteristics than conventionally-manufactured parts
  14. Potential causes of accidents in outdoor pursuits (the Meyer/Williamson matrix)
  15. Changing Directions
  16. How to report a security issue in an open source project
  17. Beware tech career advice from old heads
  18. Sidebar #4: Quantitative Risk Revisited
  19. Sidebar #3: Two Flavors of Medium Risk
  20. Sidebar #2: The Swiss Cheese Model
  21. Sidebar #1: "Exposure"

2024 18

  1. Mitigation
  2. An introduction to thinking about risk
  3. Free digital security checkups for people/organizations concerned about the incoming US government
  4. Why you should run for the DSF Board, and my goals for the DSF in 2025
  5. If we had $1,000,000…
  6. Ethical Applications of AI to Public Sector Problems
  7. All I Need to Know About Engineering Leadership I Learned From Leave No Trace
  8. Paying More for Media
  9. Why I'm Not Writing a Productivity Series
  10. Mentorship, coaching, sponsorship: three different — and equally important — tools for developing talent
  11. Discussing Open Source funding and sustainability on the Sustain podcast
  12. Talking about Django's history and future on Django Chat
  13. So you've been reorg'd...
  14. Breaking Down Tasks
  15. Paying people to work on open source is good actually
  16. Tracking Engineering Time
  17. Philanthropy Update
  18. My Diverse Hiring Playbook

2023 16

  1. Managing Technical Debt
  2. First decide how to decide: “one weird trick” for easier decisions
  3. RFC processes are a poor fit for most organizations
  4. No Yelling
  5. Performance Is Contextual
  6. Does someone need to be a good manager to give good management advice?
  7. How to Build Trust
  8. Seniority and self-management: you don't have to do this alone
  9. RTO vs WFH: my default recommendations for remote vs colocated teams
  10. Team size isn't a measure of success
  11. Should you give candidates feedback on their interview performance?
  12. Do I need a consultant, contractor or employee?
  13. Hire for Floors, not Ceilings
  14. Giving It All Away: My Philanthropic Plan
  15. Follow-ups to "Incompetent but Nice"
  16. Incompetent but Nice

2022 28

  1. You should maintain a transition file
  2. Performance "Seasons" Are Useless — Use Anniversary Reviews Instead
  3. The Intersection of Tenure and Seniority
  4. When Is Short Tenure a Red Flag?
  5. Writing With Copilot
  6. Is this a parable about software development?
  7. Role Title Terminology
  8. Post-interview recommendations: a case against 'maybe'
  9. Quality Is Systemic
  10. Taking notes in interviews
  11. Panel interviews don't work
  12. What to do if a reference check goes wrong
  13. How to Check References
  14. Yes, You Should Check References
  15. DORA Metrics: the Right Answer to measuring engineering team performance
  16. Making a Compelling Offer — in this economy?
  17. Dealing With Misalignment While Hiring
  18. Honesty is a professional behavior
  19. What is “professionalism” and why am I writing about it?
  20. Is my advice too mercenary?
  21. Your last one-on-one: what to do instead of an exit interview
  22. Exit Interviews Are a Trap
  23. I was on The Changelog
  24. That Wild Ask A Manager Story
  25. Developing a Values Interview Question
  26. Powerful (Patty McCord)
  27. Year in Review: 2021
  28. Wrap Up and Q&A

2021 57

  1. What doesn't work (and why)
  2. Labs & Simulation Environments
  3. Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day
  4. ‘Reverse’ Code Review
  5. Bring Your Own Code
  6. Pair Programming
  7. Coding “Homework”
  8. A Framework for Good Work Sample Tests: Eight Rules for Fair Tests
  9. The tradeoff between inclusivity and predictive value
  10. Introduction to Work Sample Tests
  11. When you're a manager, your behavior is under a microscope
  12. Dear Potheads, You Can Work for the U.S. Government, Maybe
  13. Simple Product Management Tricks
  14. What is your labor worth? Tech compensation in 2021
  15. How to Delegate Meeting Attendance
  16. Briefing a Delegate
  17. People- vs Results-Oriented Management: Both Work!
  18. Delegate Outcomes, Not Methods
  19. Make Failure A (Safe) Option
  20. What's delegation?
  21. “Give Away Your Toys”
  22. Probably Are Gonna Need It: Application Security Edition
  23. Team Topologies
  24. The VPP/VPE Relationship
  25. So you messed up. Now what?
  26. The art of the SWAG
  27. My Software Estimation Technique
  28. Software Estimation Is Hard. Do It Anyway.
  29. 2021 DBIR Highlights
  30. Positive feedback is different from praise
  31. The Mass Email Mistake
  32. Three Feedback Models
  33. The Fundamental Purpose of Middle Management: Context Down, Information Up
  34. Are You Stuck On Vision, Strategy, or Tactics?
  35. Embrace the Grind
  36. Adapting Interview Questions for Junior Candidates
  37. “Fair” Doesn't Mean “Equal”
  38. How managers should respond to defensiveness after feedback
  39. The Three Kinds of Organizational Power
  40. How Long Does It Take to Hire Someone?
  41. Coworking With a Friend to Write More
  42. “Why Did You Leave Your Last Job?”
  43. How to Give a Status Update To Executives
  44. Types of Interview Questions
  45. Effective Organizations Value Autonomy
  46. Interview Question Series Wrap Up
  47. The Weakness Question
  48. “Tell Me About a Disagreement…”
  49. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
  50. “Tell Me About a Project You Led…”
  51. “Explain a Topic At Multiple Levels…”
  52. SOCCR: the framework I use for decision briefs
  53. How to gather consensus before a big decision
  54. Hangar's Dumb Security Questionnaire
  55. Why I'm excited to get a COVID vaccine
  56. Bringing Security along on the CI/CD journey
  57. Designing Engineering Organizations

2020 12

  1. AI is catching up to the hype
  2. Measuring Hiring Manager Effectiveness
  3. Not all attacks are equal: understanding and preventing DoS in web applications
  4. Training Interviewers
  5. Preventing SQL Injection in Django
  6. What accomplishments sound like on software engineering resumes
  7. Layoffs are Coming
  8. Django's new governance model
  9. The Innovation/Execution Spectrum
  10. "Where did we get lucky?"
  11. Demos, Prototypes, and MVPs
  12. 📣 Now on Google Cloud Run

2019 4

  1. My Python Development Environment, 2020 Edition
  2. My questions for prospective employers (Director/VP roles)
  3. IQ isn't enough to get hired
  4. Goals aren't enough; you have to talk about performance, too

2018 7

  1. My interview kickoff script, annotated
  2. Hire me to help you hire
  3. A bit of smart security design from Tiller
  4. 2018 life update
  5. A reading list for new engineering managers
  6. The Moment
  7. My Python Development Environment, 2018 Edition

2017 3

  1. You have two jobs
  2. Five stories about the California Wildfires you probably missed
  3. Don't include social engineering in penetration tests

2016 7

  1. Getting started with pytest
  2. Django Under the Hood 2016 Highlights
  3. So you want a new admin?
  4. Ratchets & Levers
  5. 2016 DBIR Highlights
  6. A reading list for InfoSec engineers
  7. Psychological safety in the InfoSec industry

2015 2

  1. How do you run distributed standups?
  2. Shanley and my PyCon talk

2014 5

  1. Uber and the Fourth Estate
  2. Python Programmers Support the Ada Initiative
  3. Re: What Can Men Do?
  4. The limits of "unlimited" vacation
  5. Retiring as BDFLs

2013 7

  1. Bagels
  2. To my friends in the Node community
  3. On TRUCEConf
  4. Personal lessons from XOXO
  5. Join me in supporting the Ada Initiative
  6. Getting features into Django
  7. I've joined Heroku

2012 2

  1. Auto-building Sphinx docs
  2. The Django community in 2012

2011 8

  1. DIY supplies
  2. Why conferences need a code of conduct
  3. P.J. Eby on PyPI
  4. Is there a market for paid Django apps?
  5. A REST wankery question
  6. I refuse to tolerate assholes
  7. Work for me!
  8. Help desk software?

2010 18

  1. Configuration and architecture
  2. CI is hard!
  3. Office hours
  4. Django classes: deployment, ecosystem
  5. How to roast a chicken
  6. Django gotcha: concrete inheritance
  7. What's your favorite Django app?
  8. "Web Scale"
  9. Peter Norvig on programming languages
  10. man tar
  11. Mark Shuttleworth on Tribalism
  12. GvR on commit privileges
  13. What to do when PyPI goes down
  14. Backwards compatibility
  15. Util
  16. Dynamic form generation
  17. Early registration for my Advanced Django class ends soon
  18. To hell with web standards

2009 36

  1. Fixing PostgreSQL's default encoding on Ubuntu 9.10
  2. You need an editor
  3. Technical style
  4. What to write
  5. My travel kit
  6. The Django community in 2009
  7. Thank you, Rails
  8. On commit bits
  9. Lessons from Rackspace's downtime
  10. The power of "no"
  11. SEO scumbags
  12. Qft
  13. Job opportunity: engineer at Whiskey Media
  14. * is Unix
  15. Python is Unix
  16. Django Master Class, October 16
  17. Contributor License Agreements
  18. Snakes on the Web
  19. Reminder: Django Training
  20. Django Training
  21. Django internals: authentication
  22. Twenty questions about the GPL
  23. Professionalism
  24. SVN usability
  25. Looking for a Django developer?
  26. More buildout notes
  27. Developing Django apps with zc.buildout
  28. Nobody expects Python packaging!
  29. Hooray for standards
  30. Python implementation details
  31. It's time for a change
  32. FAQ: Untrusted users and HTML
  33. The taste of shame and humiliation
  34. Why I'm excited about Python 3
  35. Descriptivists and Prescriptivists
  36. What is django.contrib?

2008 9

  1. "Syntactic Sugar"
  2. Typography: Rhythm & Proportion
  3. Minimalism
  4. REST worst practices
  5. PyCon Braindump
  6. Help OSI
  7. Sailing on…
  8. A picture is worth a thousand words
  9. Shameless self-promotion

2007 19

  1. Django Book Update
  2. Of the Web
  3. CouchDB first impressions
  4. The sorry state of database journalism
  5. My "personal security" plan
  6. Seasoning Templates
  7. Die, Marker Felt, Die!
  8. Dear Adobe
  9. Some guesses about the future
  10. Django projects
  11. Django Internships at the Journal-World
  12. Circles of Django (2007)
  13. You vs. the Real World
  14. Jimbo's Number
  15. Ripped by Engadget
  16. Five things I hate about Python
  17. Overheard at PyCon
  18. I don't care whose is bigger
  19. Fried Chicken

2006 22

  1. How the news breaks
  2. Wanted: kick-ass sysadmin
  3. Pronouncement
  4. Post-OSCONum part 1: try not to suck
  5. "Show-stoppers"
  6. Digg dugg
  7. Bad dog!
  8. Improved text image view
  9. Django OSCON shirts
  10. Django propaganda
  11. A complete waste of time
  12. Django meetup in Palo Alto
  13. Merquery
  14. Quiet Enjoyment
  15. Free server? Probably not
  16. Django stuff at Pycon
  17. Free servers?
  18. Wwbd
  19. Template + Cache = Crazy Delicious
  20. Why you should use Django
  21. Strike averted
  22. Done

2005 15

  1. Dojo gets a manual
  2. Django, meet Dojo
  3. Have more…
  4. Django performance tips
  5. Hiring, part II
  6. We're hiring!
  7. What can Django learn from Rails?
  8. Lightpd on Ubuntu
  9. allofmp3.com RSS feed
  10. Private Dancer?
  11. A note to web designers
  12. A quick comparison
  13. Sera's Pancakes
  14. Django and Rails
  15. Reboot