Give Yourself Permission

I have a lot of conversations with peers at different engineering levels. The theme is almost always the same.

"I want more time to look into X, but I'm managing this large project."

"We always have tight deadlines. I don't have time to invest in Z."

I get it. We all have deadlines. Important things to accomplish. Work that needs to ship.

But we also need time to slow down. To think. To reflect. To work on something that excites us.

At work, this could be an hour a day. A few hours on Friday morning. Time you carve out for yourself. You don't need to tell anyone. You don't need to ask for permission. That is the job.

If we don't have time to better ourselves and look out for our teams and peers, we're going to fall flat. Eventually we'll want a change.

Give yourself permission to take the space.

This Week on Slightly Caffeinated

Schedules haven't aligned, and life gets in the way sometimes. That's ok! We're still planning to record today after this newsletter goes out, so keep an eye on slightlycaffeinated.fm for new episodes.

What I'm Learning

I've continued building Fine Print Hound this week. Most of my time went into infrastructure (Laravel Cloud) and tuning the diffing and ranking algorithms.

The system diffs policy document changes, compares them to previous change sets, then ranks each change. Is it important? Did something just move? There are 15-20 rules the system applies.

Claude Code found a major performance issue I missed: an O(n³) recursion bug in a few of the ranking functions. It only showed up with large documents (around 1MB). Local development didn't catch it. Real infrastructure with live data did.

The fix dropped processing time from 25 minutes to 86 milliseconds.

We also added performance tests for the pipelines to catch this kind of thing earlier. The lesson: your local environment lies to you. Test with production-scale data when performance matters.

Links Worth Your Time

25 Claude Code Tips from 11 Months of Intense Use - There's a ton of gold in this Reddit post. Take the time to read through it. Practical tips from someone who's been using Claude Code heavily.

skills.sh - A directory of skills for Claude and other AI tools. I used the openapi-to-typescript skill to scaffold types from an API spec in seconds. Worth browsing if you're looking for well-written skills to add to your workflow.

Quick Tip

If you take screenshots to paste into Claude Code, you can get them directly from your clipboard. On Mac, take the screenshot, then press Ctrl+V in the terminal. No need to save the file first, then drag it over.

That's it for this week. Reply with any tools or resources you think I should check out.

-Chris