Doug Turnbull

Visit softwaredoug.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Nov 2021 – Aug 2026

Aliases, etc that have made rebase-based workflows in Git much less advanced feeling.

Contrasting how each language handles iteration helps understand how to work effectively in either.

If you have discipline to throw away your first idea, draft, throwaway PRs often drives more progress than a design doc.

A useful pattern for LLM classification at scale is to let it hallucinate plausible, fake entities. Then resolve to real ones.

Seriously - why do we need all these vector databases? Do we need dozens of them?

A bunch of reasons to write code in 2026

Taking the output of many dumb LLM search relevance judges and feeding the output to a decision tree to improve precision

Work with amazing people you love collaborating with, the rest (mission, purpose, etc) falls out from that.

Integrating my BM25 pandas search library, SearchArray, into BEIR, in order to embarass myself in public.

Junior engineers are foundational to whether a team can collaborate and innovate

Feedback is the lifeblood of getting better, but be careful who you accept feedback from.