Essays by Frank Chen, co-founder and CTO of Balto Energy, on AI agents, knowledge systems, developer infrastructure, and behavior design — what actually ships vs. what demos well.

The AI Sea Change for the Future of Work

Examples from Human-computer Collaboration

The AI Sea Change for the Future of Work
Many of today’s headlines are dominated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT. The last few months have represented a clear sea change in public belief in the power of the large language model (LLM).
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March 13, 2023

Circuit Breakers

Applying Friction for Developer Productivity

This article accompanies the talk and shares a preview of references for the Slack engineering blog article on how Slack implemented circuit breakers in internal tooling.
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June 2, 2022

A Timeless Software Developer Reading List

The 24 books that I recommend to software developers

A Timeless Software Developer Reading List
Learning software development is a fundamental skill in today’s world. I hoped to share a list of books for understanding and growing in software development. I have shared parts of this list with team members who join my team or who I mentor.
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December 8, 2018

10 Days of Silent Meditation

Actionable knowledge from my journey to join a Goenka meditation workshop

10 Days of Silent Meditation
I recently joined a 10 day meditation workshop after procrastinating for years, despite “knowing” of meditation’s benefits. Every one’s path to meditation is different. This article is my [meanering] story to deepen my practice and how I came to join a workshop.
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October 5, 2018

Relationship Hack with Slack

A Six Month Experiment

Relationship Hack with Slack
Haley and I have been using Slack as a primary way to communicate in the past 6 months, and its been an authenticity and delight creating relationship hack.
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Sep 16, 2018

The Ultimate Beginners Guide To Web Development

Lessons from the Web Lead of an Amazon Web Service

The Ultimate Beginners Guide To Web Development
My friends love learning. This guide is an amalgamation of emails I have sent friends and things I have picked up in my journey to learn web development [1]. By the end of this guide you’ll be able to answer the following questions: “How might I build a personal website...
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Sep 16, 2018

Writing Workflow

Building a System that Lasts

Writing Workflow
This article is about the steps I’ve taken to iterate upon my writing workflow. I’m writing this partially as documentation of how to structure a writing project in the same way as a software project.
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Sep 16, 2018

How to Design for Habit

The Secret to Making Great Products

How to Design for Habit
Let’s say you created a product. A product that solves a common specific problem for many people. Yet, after a sign-up or an application download for your solution, people continue to have the same problem and do not use your product. “Why?!” Why might someone continue to have a problem...
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Sep 16, 2018