Digital garden · field notes · working theories

Nessa Jane Marin

Field notes on software craft, technical leadership, coaching, and staying human with changing tools.

Browse writing What I’m tending now

Start with a trail

Three ways into the garden, depending on what brought you here.

Engineering Craft

Readable abstractions, language learning, tooling, and practical software design.

Leadership in Practice

Influence, growth, management lessons, and returning to hands-on technical leadership.

AI & Creative Practice

Agentic coding, context stewardship, humane tool use, and keeping craft alive.

Fresh signals

Short thoughts and media notes, kept separate from the longer writing archive.

Thoughts All thoughts

Nessa Jane Marin

Software Engineer, Manager, Coach

March 15, 2026

I needed somewhere to put my tweets that wasn’t twitter, or bluesky, or mastodon, or…

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Recently tended

Recent notes and essays with enough context to choose your next step.

Full archive

Stop Prompting, Start Coaching What Co-Active coaching taught me about getting better results from AI coding agents, and what treating an agent like a capable collaborator actually looks like in practice. code Tended March 29, 2026 9 min

Learning Agentic Coding On a Budget Budget-friendly approaches to learning agentic coding without expensive API tokens. code Tended March 24, 2026 10 min

It took me a year to write about AI and all I got was this stupid blog post... After more than a year of thinking, listening, and learning, I finally write about AI — the concerns, the nuance, and why I'm both an optimist and a skeptic. leadership Tended March 19, 2026 6 min

How to Learn a Programming Language in 7 Days Learn from a polyglot of 15 years how to pick up new languages quickly code Tended March 19, 2026 9 min

Undeleting Myself: Embracing Cringe and the Joy of Code Once upon a time, I was told 'if you need this to be fun, this probably isn't the job for you'... leadership Tended March 19, 2026 9 min

Declarative is the Wrong Goal Here lie half-baked thoughts… code Tended March 19, 2026 2 min