You Didn’t Hear This from Me - Kelsey McKinney
∞Finished reading: You Didn’t Hear This from Me (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip by Kelsey McKinney 📚
To be honest, it didn’t quite hit for me. Fundamentally, I’m already a fan and a believer, and look to Kelsey as a Though Leader in the field of gossip.
This book read like so much of it was about citing her way to establishing an authoritative voice. I went in looking more for the firehose of McKinney takes.
I think she establishes the core take early in the book: gossip is Important. It has the power to contribute to social phenomena that can protect people from danger, and unseat people with hidden operations. It should, like so many things, be asked what it hopes to accomplish rather than merely judged as Good or Bad.
It’s a good take, well established by hours of Normal Gossip guest interviews. I was moved over the years of listening to Kelsey develop this perspective as the seasons went on.
I think this book was probably good. It had the feeling while I read it that it was probably Contributing to the Conversation, and maybe just going over my head?
It's Never Been More Important To Understand The Problem
∞Whether “code is free” or not, it’s clear that code is becoming cheaper, and problems that used to be complex enough to require programming, but not wide enough to warrant the cost are suddenly viable for everyone to take on.
We used to have a moat because we had software; because we had features we had already built that existed and functioned.
It’s never been more critical to have clarity in product thinking—to understand what people actually need, and to be decisive about delivering those things. If code is free, are features free? Is that the worlds simplest recipe for feature bloat? My least favorite software is the one that cannot tell me how it wants to be used.
I think the same is also true for code. Sure, the agents can blather out hundreds of lines a minute, and sure they might “adhere to best practices and maintain code coverage” if your CLAUDE.md file says to. But when the code becomes bloated and convoluted, when the interfaces become unwieldy, when the code begs for thoughtful refactoring, who will be there to guide the hand that types? Who has the clarity of mind and the backing theory to understand why the code is hard to reason about and hard to test?
Time to redouble our efforts to make sure we understand which problems are actually worth solving.
2026 Goals
∞- Share at least one thing to the TIL feed every day.
- Write at least one proper post per month. Hopefully about work, engineering, management, etc
- Write at least one book review per month. Notably, this requires reading at least one book per month