The engineering teams I look back on as truly great share less than people assume. Smart people, of course. Doing this work well is hard, and the teams I'm thinking of were all made up of people who w...

I started 2025 with a goal to write and publish essays about software. That was my entire focus with this site and, I'm happy to say, I did just that. I didn't focus on specific themes around software...

Let's get the caveat out of the way first. My perspective here is about businesses. There are certainly different tradeoffs and values in other types of organizations, but I'm talking specifically abo...

The conversation around AI has become increasingly absolutist. While there are many aspects of AI open for debate, from impacts on the economy to the environment to professional implications, I'm part...

After reading Design Principle: Composable Services someone asked "How do you keep consistency with this approach long-term?", noting that they've seen it tried, but eventually things get out of hand....

After publishing Taking a Step Back from Ruby, I heard from a lot of people. Some agreed, some didn’t, and a few offered perspectives that helped me clarify what I didn’t fully explore in that post: w...

I wrote briefly about this on Mastodon earlier in the month, but I wanted to expand on my thoughts a bit. I’ve been writing and defending Ruby for more than 20 years. It isn't a huge community, and i...

284 Posts, 267 Following, 28 Followers · Dad and husband. Principal Engineer at North. Occasional advisor to engineering leaders. Co-founder and sole engineer behind Limited Run. Ex-Recharge (Sr Direc...

We used to have a saying on Recharge's Platform Services team: It should be really easy to use and really hard to fuck up. As a team building a platform that allowed not only ourselves, but other engi...

Ages ago, when I was still a student, I taught myself Ruby on Rails for my senior thesis and fell in love. Fifteen years later, and I’ve used Rails at every job I’ve ever held in the tech industry. Fifteen years, and I still love Rails! But there’s something rotten at its core, and we share a name.

Trump’s most brazen attack on free speech yet.

Earn Your Scale Push run-of-the-mill stacks as far as they’ll take you. Learn their limits, then make the trade-offs of specialty infrastructure only when you’ve truly outgrown simple, proven paths. T...

Can you imagine what #ruby would look like if code of conduct violations were actually enforced? Especially against our white supremacists? Refreshing to be reminded that world could exist if we wanted it. Good for the PSF and its moderators for maintaining a healthy community. 👏🏽 https://social.jacobian.org/@jacob/115215001618713506

For the last ten years or so of working on Bundler, I’ve had a wish rattling around: I want a better dependency manager. It doesn’t just manage your gems, it manages your ruby versions, too. It doesn’...

About a month ago, I started a new role as a Principal Engineer at North. On paper, it might look like a big shift after spending the past eight years in leadership. But looking at my whole career, it...

John McDowall's blog posts and thoughts.

A deep dive into how I built accessibility into the foundation of my Vue frontend—using clear patterns, centralized announcements, and Cursor-enforced rules. This post shares practical, testable strat...

Ring reverses its plan to stop sharing video with law enforcement.

Composable Services Services are small, predictable units that can be run in isolation, invoked directly, or chained via workflows. Each service has a uniform interface: it accepts input as a hash and...

Early on at Recharge, after joining as an Engineering Manager, I was encouraged to write a simple guide to working with me. It wasn’t meant for onboarding. It wasn’t for performance reviews. It was f...

Look at me. I’m the originalist, now.

Lately, I’ve been hearing from other developers who are feeling conflicted about AI. Not just whether they should use it, but what it means that they’re being pushed to use it. Some are worried about ...

On a recent call, someone raised a question about whether we were storing a certain type of data with enough precision. They’d seen an error and suspected our current schema might not support the full...

There’s a common metaphor about ducks. On the surface, they glide across the water effortlessly—serene, calm, in control. But below the surface, they’re paddling like hell. In engineering teams, we o...

From Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, here’s how every single news report on the economy plays out: Dennis and Pamela People are affected by numbers, and since they have a child, you’ll empathize with what they say whil

A recent tell-all by a Facebook insider reveals the insidious nature of Facebook's advertising empire, and the dangerous consequences.

I came across this post the other day that perfectly captured something I’ve felt for years but could never quite articulate: Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with

I came across this post the other day that perfectly captured something I’ve felt for years but could never quite articulate: Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing...

When I started building the base framework for Looping, I defined a set of design principles to guide its development. Establishing these principles from the start helped refine my thinking, avoid imp...

When I started building the base framework for Looping, I defined a set of design principles to guide its development. Establishing these principles from the start helped refine my thinking, avoid imp...

I’ve been writing software for as long as I can remember. Long before I studied Computer Science in high school and college, I had side projects—things that pushed me to learn new languages, framework...

When I started building the base framework for Looping, which I call Envoy, I defined a set of design principles to guide its development. This is something I highly recommend doing—it refines your th...

Software has been a part of my life for 25 years—spanning startups, high-growth SaaS, engineering leadership, and my own ventures. Over time, I've seen how teams build and evolve software, and I've al...

The number of times in my career that I’ve spoken with an engineer who doesn’t know which team owns a particular service or whom to ask a specific question is shocking. Whether you’re an individual contributor or an engineering manager, knowing who’s in your team, organization,

I started this piece in late November. It's a piece I usually write Christmas as a kick-off to the new year. The precise process by which this yearly piece arrives is a mystery. Probably the metal res...

A method for magic.