Shows
Amy Writes WordsA few things instead of a whole-ass EssayHello folks! It’s been difficult for me to maintain the habit of sending this newsletter regularly. This isn’t surprising, we all know habits are hard to build. Anyways, try, try again.The perfect is the enemy of everything, so here’s an imperfect offering for you.I will always bet against cruelty, not because I think I’ll win that bet, but because I don’t choose every day to go on living so that I can throw in with powerful men who behave badly. Yes, I’m talking about Elon Musk.Also in re...
2022-12-1812 min
Amy Writes WordsThe Book of Life and The Book of DeathCW: suicide. The word death is in the title here, folks, what do you expect from me?Q: You go dark for months and months, Amy and then this is what you come back to us with? MORE DARK?A: yes, apparently that is correct. I have been super busy and all my newsletter activity has fallen by the wayside but today I had a thing to say and this is a venue in which to say it. You could argue that it’s better placed in my other newsletter, Woe, but it’s not exac...
2022-10-0510 min
MaintainableAmy Isikoff Newell - Code Shouldn't Drive Us To DrinkRobby has a chat with the VP of Engineering at ConvertKit, Amy Isikoff Newell. Amy starts off by talking about why perfection is the enemy of software development. There’s no engineer who likes admitting that there are messy bits in their code. They think the messy bits shouldn’t be there, but that's not possible. Amy feels that when it comes to the maintainability of software, it shouldn’t drive an engineer to drink. For her, well-maintained software should be about delivering great value to users with minimal pain points.She ends up talking about a lot of...
2022-05-3040 min
Amy Writes WordsThree Icebergs, Two Internet Miracles, and One Mint-Condition Set of Sassy MagazinesHello and welcome back to Amy Writes Words. It’s been a minute; I’m working on not making excuses for myself and I have been recently bingeing Adele’s new album, so I’ll just say “I don’t have to explain myself to you/I’m a grown woman and I do what I want to do.” I think she was talking about a torrid romance and actually I’m talking about a sick cat, but whatevs. Today I want to talk about impact.I've written before about the challenges of measuring our impact in the world...
2022-02-1622 min
Amy Writes WordsThe Owl of HopeI’ve been thinking about hope a lot. As the year turned over I found myself beset by difficulties.Of course, there was the arrival of Omicron, making the entire holiday season seem less like a celebration and more like Yeats’ rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Or like waiting for the uninvited guest in The Masque of the Red Death. I’d really rather be Waiting for Godot. Yes, I crammed three literary references into this paragraph. I was almost an English major. Words are important to me.Next, it was th...
2022-01-0417 min
Amy Writes WordsArea Woman Reveals Shocking Secret: Admitting you need help not, in fact, the hardest partLike my most recent newsletter, about how to be creative when your back’s against the wall, this is another shared issue between woe and amy writes words. I’m doing this for two reasons.First, I’m guessing there are folks subscribed to amy writes words but not to woe because they don’t identify as mentally ill, but actually two years into the mass trauma that has been the pandemic, we are well into the epidemic of mental illness that the public health experts have been raising alarms about since the beginning. By which I mean: wh...
2021-12-2817 min
Amy Writes WordsHow to be creative when your back's against the wall, bell hooks tribute editionThis is a cross-post from my other newsletter, woe, which you should also subscribe to. I had not intended to send any newsletter this week, and now somehow I’m sending both. Share, subscribe, reply, buy a subscription, spread the word. Thank you.Here you go:It's 10 pm EST, and I already said I wasn't going to send a Woe this week. I've had some intense meetings. My son is just home from college. I am busy preparing a two minute comment to my local school committee on the topic of how, seeing as...
2021-12-1609 min
Amy Writes WordsWhy I'm Finally Renouncing Exclamation PointsHello it’s me, Amy Newell, engineering leader/mental health advocate/boot fanatic, with another good-enough newsletter issue for you. This issue has been sitting around in various states of readiness for literally months now. Editing it has felt just like the very first wisdom tooth I had to get extracted. The tooth wouldn’t come out, and the dentist was grappling with it for far too long a time, and I was not under anesthesia, and there were all these awful crunching noises as the tooth started shattering under the pressure of the pliers, so at the...
2021-12-0223 min
Amy Writes WordsHow to Talk To Me About Amy Wears Boots: A Primer, for MenHi again it’s me, Amy, with a weekly newsletter slash podcast about tech, management, gender, mental illness, and sometimes fashion. This week, what do you do about a problem like Amy Wears Boots, a primer just for men.But first, if you’re reading this on the internet why not subscribe, and if you’re subscribed already why not upgrade to a paying subscription because that’s how you show you love and appreciate all the work I put into this?Okay, let’s move on to our topic for the day.Sometimes...
2021-11-1617 min
Amy Writes WordsWhy I did a 180 on remote workWell, hello, Amy Newell here with another down-to-the-wire newsletter issue. How can I have five thousand ideas, 17 different drafts of essays, and not a single one that feels ready to send? Clearly I need to tune my production process, but what this means for me now is that it’s Friday afternoon and I have to make up something on the fly in the same way that I make a dinner out of random stuff I found in the cupboard. Today’s on-the-fly newsletter topic is… why I went from never wanting to work at an all-remote compan...
2021-11-1211 min
Amy Writes WordsThe First Rule of Talking About the Stuff is You Do Not Talk about the StuffI’m dealing with some Stuff right now. I do not like this Stuff and I do not want to deal with it. My whole body is vibrating with how much I do not like this Stuff. I am being deliberately obscure about what the Stuff is. It’s Stuff, okay. You don’t always need to know more. I’ve been writing feverishly about this Stuff, but the writing I am doing is not the kind of writing I can ship today, or maybe ever:That I cannot publish this particular writing is itself causing...
2021-11-0311 min
Amy Writes WordsA Cheap Audio ExperimentSo, what you have here is a recording of last week’s issue, Amy Writes Words, #20: On Metrics: Part 1 of 3 million. It occurred to me that some of you may prefer to listen to me read my newsletter to you while you do dishes rather than you yourself having to read the newsletter. So I thought I’d experiment. But I’m lazy and the experiment needed to be very cheap. (If you can run a cheap experiment, you should. There’s your engineering wisdom for the day.)This is not good audio quality...
2021-10-2713 min