A naturalist's notebook tended in public.
I'm Brittany, a Staff Engineer at GitHub, but mostly someone who writes things down: about technical careers, about community, and about what's growing in my back garden. This site holds the pieces.
The garden beds
~ the orchard ~Everything I've harvested.
posts, talks, comics, newsletters →
~ the seedling tray ~Notes still figuring themselves out.
half-formed thoughts and rough drafts →
~ the community garden ~Tending with other people.
communities, conferences, meetups →
~ the gardener's notebook ~What I'm tending right now.
a dated note, rebuilt each deploy →
A short feed.
the five most recent things → see them all
- Podcast
Summary Software engineering career moves don't have to be a lottery. In this episode, Adam Argyle breaks down why the technical interview process is fundamentally broken, how design engineering skills actually transfer across roles, and the tactical job search playbook that…
- Podcast
Brittany shares her journey building Collective Social - a Goodreads-style app for all kinds of media built entirely on the AT Protocol - and how it led her to create OpenSocial, a service that lets any app on the decentralized web share group functionality like book clubs. The…
- Podcast
Summary In this episode, Erika talks with Salma Alam-Naylor about software engineering craft, programming best practices, and why the long game beats shortcuts. As AI coding tools proliferate and everyone chases speed, Salma digs into deliberate practice, sustainable career…
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter May 2026 • Issue # 45 ATTENTION: We are 1/3 of the way through the year. 33% already! Where did the time go? These past two months have been a blur (oops I accidentally skipped a newsletter month again). I celebrated a wedding, did a…
- Podcast
Tech careers don't need to mean grinding LeetCode. In episode 57, John Crickett — 30+ year engineer, Coding Challenges creator (90K+ subscribers) — makes the case that programmer productivity skyrockets when you build real tools instead. We dig into why your own Redis, Git, or…