121
RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
Oscar's thoughts too large for a tweet
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,086 posts.
122
Automating myself out of development
On how I progressively removed myself using Claude Code out of the development cycle - or did I?..
123
Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers
We've all worked with a rockstar developer. They joined the team years ago, full of energy. They had great ideas about new tech, new paradigms, new architectures. Their cutting-edge ideas left everyone else feeling a bit behind and outdated.
124
Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
So, my latest post went viral. And with virality, you get a ton of comments that you must reply to. I don't want to reply in HN/Reddit/Whatever to prev...
125
Doing nothing at work
Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they…
126
LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
I'm a software engineer, completing 10 years of professional experience this year. I started my career as a web frontend engineer (it was easier for me to de...
127
Apple rejected my dictation app for using the accessibility API
Apple rejected WhisperPad under Guideline 2.4.5 for using the accessibility API to paste transcribed text. After an appeal that ended in another rejection, I split it into two versions — a compliant one on the App Store, and the original auto-paste version, direct.
128
Domain expertise has always been the real moat
The hard part of writing software has never been the writing. It was building a working model of the domain in your head first. Before you could ship a payroll…
129
AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers
Across hundreds of Reddit threads and a small body of clinical literature, AI-driven displacement is producing an emotional category that most closely resembles grief, and the institutions causing it have no language for it.
130
The Last Technical Interview
Today we will pour one out for the vaunted technical interview process, which is on its last leg. And we’ll talk a little about what’s…
131
The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)
Interestingly enough, at least two of them were specifically about performance!
132
Can we have the day off?
So, apparently we are at the cusp of the entire world’s white collar workforce (and, by extension, much of the US workforce) undergoing a revolution in productivity. AI is the technology that is going to revolutionize the way we work, the way we interact with the world, the way we learn, the way we socialize, and all…
133
The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon
The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of…
134
The worst job interview I ever had
Or how not to do a culture fit interview
135
A portentous reunion
I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids.
136
The Ask
Coffee in hand, I sit down in the Cave. Any Tuesday during the work week, a sip, and I parse the calendar. 1:1 — he's fine. Status meeting — listen. Staff me
137
Human Bottlenecks
Why AI won't augment human capabilities much.
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AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills
Friendly articles and tutorials for front-end web developers. ❤️
139
Why is Inkwell stuck in review
I submitted Inkwell for iOS to Apple for review on April 21st. It has gone through numerous rejections, code changes, resubmissions, clarifications, one phone call, and one appeal to the review board, which I’m still waiting to hear back on.
140
Dumb ways for an open source project to die
How your dependencies became Bernies
141
Don’t Outsource the Learning
Right now, it's too easy to let AI write the code while you skip the learning. The bug gets fixed. Your mental model doesn't move. We are silently trading fu...
142
Halt and Catch Fire
I have never watched the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire, and for a long time I only knew the title, but nothing about the show. Something about it always reminded...
143
Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
Why senior developers talk in terms of complexity while the rest of the business is worried about uncertainty. And what to do about it now that AI is in the picture.
144
Learning Software Architecture
In reply to an email asking about learning software design skills as a researcher physicist:
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GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values
A letter to our customers and our investors.
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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall. However, it seems pretty obvious that using AI to perform a task…
147
Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels
I'm creating a simple developer utility to make managing Claude Code profiles (e.g. running it with DeepSeek, or some OpenRouter models) a little bit easier.
148
I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
I was one of the very first advocates for AWS back when it was brand new - SQS, S3, EC2 SimpleDB - it was a lot smaller back then. In fact I...
149
Mythical Man Month
a bliki entry for Mythical Man Month
150
Going Full Time on Open Source
Why I left Figma to work full-time on open source, and how I plan to make the work sustainable.