About Me

Full-time Elixir developer/fanboy since 2015 and team lead since 2019. (Watch my Elixir/Erlang videos or my 2018 EMPEX presentation on the medication service I built at Teladoc.) Proud dad to two wonderful teens. World’s luckiest husband since 1995.

Open “James Lavin: My Skills” slide deck as a PDF My Skills (downloadable PDF slides)

Weekends & evenings, I switch from work coding to fun coding. When not hunched over a keyboard (BTW… protect your back with a split keyboard like the Kinesis Freestyle2 with 20" separation!), I’m likely enjoying jazz or audiobooks while doing chores or going on long walks. (Books I’ve recently “read”) I love databases, Kubernetes, decoupling, single-responsibility, functional programming, concurrent programming, event sourcing, Kafka & RabbitMQ Streams, small, well-named functions, and clean code. Absolutely love Phoenix LiveView. Will code in JavaScript with a gun to my head.

Past lives include: professional Rubyist, economics PhD (Stanford), Chinese studies MA (Stanford), government department award for best thesis on American government (Harvard), economics MSc (LSE), author of “Management Secrets of the New England Patriots, Vols 1 & 2”. Fun fact: Won fellowships to two advanced Mandarin programs in China after my PhD and planned to become a professor of Chinese political economy but landed in tech after the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia and I decided against studying in China.

Stop micromanaging & micromonitoring knowledge workers!

Don't hire rock stars then force them to play classical music!

 Posted on May 20, 2023  |  

Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare. – Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team For years, I’ve been shocked and saddened so many tech companies have heavy-handed management and toxic work environments. Companies become great by fostering creative, collaborative, committed teams… not by collecting talented “individual contributors” and carefully counting how many JIRA points each racks up. [Read More]
management  leadership  micromanagement  servant leadership  creativity  employee engagement  psychological safety 

Why I Love Elixir

...and Companies Are Crazy Not To Use It

 Posted on May 16, 2023  |  

Motorola funded a study which involved rewriting a telecommunication system used by the emergency services from C++ to Erlang, focusing on productivity gains. Depending on how you calculated, the code reduction in the Erlang system achieved a result of 4-20 times less code. The 20 times reduction assumed the OTP libraries to be part of the Erlang standard libraries, which they are. As C++ did not have a generic OTP, the original project had to implement a good part of it. [Read More]
Elixir  Erlang  concurrency  Phoenix  LiveView 

Internet Service Providers and Customer Lock-In

 Posted on April 22, 2023  |  

For many years, Optimum.com has held a monopoly over high-speed Internet service in my area, so we’ve been stuck with them. As a monopoly, Optimum has gotten away with providing horrible customer service and jacking up prices to ridiculous levels. Customers had no alternatives, so Optimum got away with it. Luckily, there’s FINALLY – in 2023 – competition in our area! So, a few weeks back, my wife called Optimum to complain about our absurd bill… way more than double what the new competitor in our area, Frontier. [Read More]
ISPs  internet  networking  economics  business 

Why Are Americans So Rude? Can We Fix This?

 Posted on April 21, 2023  |  

Congress has recently considered banning unruly passengers from flying on commercial planes. American Airlines flight attendant Pedro Enriquez laments that this remains just an idea: “It is disappointing to me that a passenger who was arrested for physically assaulting and spitting in a flight attendant’s face can continue to fly on commercial airplanes here in the United States”. Last week, my family took a vacation during our kids’ spring break. My wife, daughter, and I were blessed with wonderful weather while visiting Lake Ontario, the Erie Canal, and two of the Finger Lakes while our son – serving as principal trombone of the All-Eastern Orchestra – was rehearsing for his concert. [Read More]
civility 

America's Half Century of Rising Industry Concentration, Market Power, and Corporate Profitability

 Posted on April 2, 2023  |  

(Source: Robert Reich, The Biggest Economic Lies We’re Told) There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. – Warren Buffett (Source: Jon Schwarz, The Murder of the U.S. Middle Class Began 40 Years Ago This Week, The Intercept) A major reason Donald Trump narrowly won the presidency in 2016 was his skill at tapping into the very real and legitimate frustration and anger many Americans feel toward the rich and powerful, who seem to have hogged all the economic gains of the past fifty years for themselves. [Read More]
corporate profit  monopoly power  deregulation  media consolidation 

TV Series I've Enjoyed Recently

 Posted on April 1, 2023  |  

I watch far less television than most, but I’ve binge-watched some series in recent years that I enjoyed and recommend. In roughly declining order of how much I enjoyed them: Andor (brilliant dialogue; characters & plot feel grippingly authentic/relatable; “good guys” doing bad things for higher reasons; “bad guys” acting out of principle; first few episodes are slow/confusing, but keep going; watched this twice) The Expanse Schitt’s Creek Invincible (I normally don’t enjoy superhero stories or cartoons, but this was fabulous) For All Mankind The Mandalorian Ted Lasso (first season was great; second was good) The Orville (please renew this! [Read More]
TV  sci-fi 

My Blog Is Back... Thanks to Elon!

We can't entrust our 'free speech' to corporations

 Posted on April 1, 2023  |  

I enjoyed blogging till I fell hard for Twitter, circa 2010. I enjoyed many wonderful years on Twitter, learning a ton by following fascinating people and mostly re-sharing their great Tweets. Alas, in 2022, Elon Musk’s arrogant incompetence destroyed Twitter overnight, and now I’m back to blogging! I’m horrified the beautiful knowledge-sharing town square Twitter once was could so easily be bought and contorted into a corrupted shell of its former greatness. [Read More]
Twitter  blogging  Mastodon  social media  billionaires 

Corporations & Complexity Blocking Internet Innovation

Why hasn't the Internet unleashed an explosion of innovation? It's too hard! Example: My greedy ISP blocks the port needed to share content on the Internet

 Posted on December 12, 2020  |  James Lavin

Wasn’t The Internet Supposed to Unleash an Innovation Explosion? “One of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. [Read More]
Internet  innovation  ISPs  corporate greed  Javascript  complexity 

Critical Habits

Habits essential for long-term health & happiness

 Posted on November 30, 2020  |  James Lavin

Essential Habits Sleep enough Exercise regularly Generally eat healthy foods Keep your weight down Avoid burnout Connect socially with other people Sufficient sleep You should wake up feeling fresh. Your body and mind require a good night’s sleep. If you deprive yourself sufficient sleep, you will suffer for it in both the short and long term: Why Do We Need Sleep?. Many of us aren’t getting enough sleep: 1 in 3 adults don’t get enough sleep (US Centers for Disease Control) [Read More]
habits  health  sustainability  happiness 

Tech Keeps Going Stale

Our 'permanent' records aren't so permanent

 Posted on November 29, 2020  |  James Lavin

Data obsolescence vs. laziness Years ago, I had a blog I enjoyed posting to. One day, something made the software I used to power my blog annoyingly hard to use. Most likely, something changed that required me to upgrade or update something else and I was too lazy to do so. The longer I waited to make the change, the harder the change became, and I just never bothered. Besides, my original posts still showed up. [Read More]
tech  obsolescence  decay