Natik's Journal

Here's how I work, how to work with me, and known failure modes.

Had to spin up a new work laptop, so I figured — I'll tweak my Zed setup, do some dogfooding, and show you how to make Zed AI assist awesome!

Half of your job is to handle surprises. Some of those come from above. The kicker is you can learn to see the surprises brewing before the shitstorm hits. You've seen this movie before.

Embedding Excalidraw drawings from Obsidian in Contentlayer / MDX.

I've been here a year, here's what I have to show for it.

With dark mode support and a custom Vercel build script.

@mitchellh's new terminal app is pretty great.

Get it out there. You can fill in the blanks later.

Or how Claude sent me on a side quest for the perfect language code API.

Spray and pray and find out

Career growth advice for junior engineers on remote teams.

You 👏 won't 👏 grow 👏 without 👏 stetch 👏 goals.

Turns out, rendering MDX in an RSS feed in Next.js is a PITA

You can make iOS and Mac app icons directly with SwiftUI, without any design tools like Figma!

Lead your teams with integrity, honesty, and transparency. Don't let fear and cynicism poison the team.

How to lead a team in remote-first environment, and establish the communication systems and standards so that your team moves quickly, and people are healthy and happy and don't get routinely overwhelmed with notifications.

Rails approach to designing products (in code) allows teams to build extremely quickly, but constraints the team's ability to think with unorthodox or new approaches. Here's what I've seen happen in practice, when designing in code works well, what are some of the downsides, and when it just doesn't work at all.

Remote doesn't suck. Attempts to shove in-office meeting HiPPO culture into a remote medium suck. Here's how to help your teams work better in an asynchronous environment.

Saying "No" is extremely valuable. But not just for you — for your team and larger organization as well. Here's how.

Contentlayer is the easiest way to setup markdown with mdx source to static website pipeline. Here's how it's implemented in respawn.io.

How to quickly check-in with your team, and make sure people feel safe, supported, and motivated, in a remote environment.

Shipping your library's DocC documentation to GitHub Pages, and keeping it up to date with a GitHub action.

Using swift-docc-plugin for SwiftPM to export your docs, and swift-docc-render to get a static website with your documentation.

When you can't quite use the Migration Assistant, but not ready to geek out all the way with Ansible.

Here's a minimal set of signals I'm looking for when interviewing engineering managers.

What role you play for each person on your team, and in your organization.

Getting un-stuck and picking up one learning subject at a time.

Switching back and forth between engineering and engineering management is totally fine.

I had a couple hours on a Thursday night, and wanted to clean up my website. The result is this: a blog built with Obsidian, Markdown, Next.js, Contentlayer, and a few hacks to glue things together.