31
Fuck it, make it anyway
Carrying on in the face of creative devaluation.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 259 posts.
32
I'm addicted to being useful
When I get together with my friends in the industry, I feel a little guilty about how much I love my job. This is a tough time to be a software engineer. The…
33
How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
How listening broadly turns everyday problems into useful project ideas.
34
Coding is not solved
Tell me you don’t understand software without literally using those words!!!
35
Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got
My CTO leaned back in our 1-on-1 and said something that sounded almost threatening: "You want to get promoted? Try to take my position."
36
Doing the thing is doing the thing
Software Engineer, LITM
37
Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
We’ve all heard of those network effect laws: the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of members. Or the cost of commun...
38
Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager
Non-obvious advice that I wish I learned sooner.
39
Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
The need for ongoing friction in long-term skill formation.
40
Someone behind the software
I think good products carry something of the people who make them. Their experience, what they care about, and how they think things should work.
41
How I estimate work
There’s a kind of polite fiction at the heart of the software industry. It goes something like this: Estimating how long software projects will take is very…
42
How to ask for help from people who don't know you
Pradyumna's site
43
Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
I’ll be attending Babashka Conf on May 8 and Dutch Clojure Days on May 9. If you’re attending either (or just visiting Amsterdam), drop me a line!
44
I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories
I’ve decided to archive the source code of my Ruby gems to make it clear that I’m no longer working on them; I’ve written this post to link from them in order to explain why.
45
Leaving Mozilla
> On burn-out and bull-headedness
46
Code and Let Live
How we learned to stop worrying and love writeable root filesystems.
47
Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension
A systems analysis of how AI-assisted development creates a gap between output speed and understanding, and why organizations cannot see it happening.
48
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.
49
The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
An update to Brooks's Law in the age of AI.
50
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…
51
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…
52
Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI
AI definitely helps with productivity, but only when you have the right culture in place first!
53
I Inspected My Take-Home Interview Project. It Was a Whole Operation
Appaji, a Computer Science graduate from IIT Patna and former intern at Arista Networks, is a Software Engineer at Infinite Reality. Passionate about building innovative web experiences, with a strong interest in sustainable and customer-focused startups.
54
Leaving Google has actively improved my life
In May of 2023, Google introduced “AI overviews” into their search engine.^1] This followed years of decisions leading to worse search quality and the consum...
55
The peril of laziness lost
In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris:
56
Build your own decision model
"System one" decision models are models that infer and respond with calibrated probabilities or every allowed answer. Consider your everyday language model, to get typed output from it (JSON), you may use Structured Output to constrain the output to guaranteed valid JSON. While model prefills the input in one pass,
57
I don't want the details
Why reasonable explanations are one of the easiest ways to avoid changing anything.
58
Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people
I spend a lot of time negotiating this in the software world: And if you're wondering why this happens, it's normally because: 1. people aren't talking to people 2. people aren't listening So lots of designers and product people have leapt onto 1, basically trying to
59
I paid people to try and follow my README
Developers suck at writing documentation. We like to say RTFM but often there ain't no FM to R. At best we have a half-arsed collection of notes, some obsolete tips, and a link to a desolate forum full of people asking the same questions again and again. That's no way to treat our users. I naïvely believe there's a…
60
I quit. The clankers won
The one where I pack up my bags.