Why Code Like A Little Old Lady?

I learned to code in the late 1970s on a TRS-80, as the only girl in the computer club. I did not think of it as a career then. It was just the place where I fit.

Decades later, I am a Principal Software Engineer. I have shipped code on mainframes and Sun workstations, in oil companies and startups, during the five-year Vista cycle and the micro AI sprint. I have watched technologies arrive, promise transformation, and quietly become infrastructure. I have been here for most of the cycles.

Code Like a Little Old Lady is named for the woman who drove twenty-five miles an hour while everyone else swerved around her. Slow. Predictable. Unbothered. Not because she could not go faster. Because she knew something about where she was going.

This newsletter is about engineering judgment. Not capability, which is easy to demonstrate, but judgment, which takes time to earn. I write about how I actually work: the thinking behind the decisions, the tools I use and why, the things I have learned to slow down for.

I write about feelings too, because feelings are how judgment gets formed, even in a field that prefers to pretend otherwise.

If you are looking for prompt tricks and workflow hacks, there are plenty of those elsewhere. If you are looking for someone who has been doing this long enough to tell you what actually holds, you are in the right place.

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