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How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments
AI forced me to abandon evidence-based best pedagogy practices, focus on oral and written exams, and redo most assignments. Here is what we did in 17-645...
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The Cold Email
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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First Principles Thinking
On first principles thinking, learning to work with agents, and setting experience aside long enough to see a problem clearly.
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The senior engineer death spiral
on proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
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RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
Oscar's thoughts too large for a tweet
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Programming Isn't Special
Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?
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Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
I work as an Engineering Manager at Google, and my teams practice a simple habit - we book all meetings to start at five minutes past the hour (or half hour). This works better than trying to finish five minutes early. Meetings often don't finish on time, and the impact is highest with back-to-back meetings.…
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I have officially retired from Emacs
This past Tuesday I typed C-x C-c in Emacs for the last time after 20 years of daily use. Though nearly half that time was gradually retiring it, switching to modal editing, then to Vim. Emacs is a platform, and I’d grown accustomed to its applications, especially those I built myself. There was no particular hurry…
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Systems Thinking
A blog about software development and programming.
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Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
Solitary work, creativity and larval ideas
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What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes
So I've been job hunting lately. Reading job postings, doing interviews, talking to engineering teams at like a dozen companies. And I noticed...
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Why senior engineers let bad projects fail
When I was a junior engineer, my manager would occasionally confide his frustrations to me in our weekly 1:1s. He would point out a project another team was working on and say, “I don’t believe that …
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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…
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Why I left iNaturalist
After almost 18 years, I left iNaturalist, the product and organization I helped create. I left because I don’t believe the current Leadership team is pointing the product in the right direction, and I don’t think they are managing their talented staff in an empathetic or effective way. If you’d like me to continue…
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The future of software engineering is SRE
When code gets cheap operational excellence wins. Anyone can build a greenfield demo, but it takes engineering to run a service.
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Goodbye Google
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
A short write-up on my experience completing a Computer Science BSc from my bedroom.
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20 years on AWS and never not my job
While I created my AWS account because I was interested in Amazon S3, that was not in fact immediately available to me: In the early days of AWS, you had to specifically ask for each new service to be enabled for your account. My new AWS account did come with two services enabled by default, though — Amazon Simple…
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A Programmer's Loss of Identity
This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me . In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be…
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Stories from 25 Years of Software Development
Last year, I completed 20 years in professional software development. I wanted to write a post to mark the occasion back then, but couldn't find the time. This post is my attempt to make up for that omission. In fact, I have been involved in software development for a little longer than 20 years. Although I had my…
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I don't want your PRs anymore
Notes by `dpc`
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Successful companies go blind
The Mexican cavefish kept its eye genes for over a million years after the eyes themselves disappeared. Something similar happens to companies once they achieve success.
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Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship
Thomas Dullien’s guide to software and SaaS B2B entrepreneurship.
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The reverts will continue until morale improves
Many readers will be aware that an unusually high number of features have been reverted from the PostgreSQL 19 branch after the beta period began. Having some reverts is not unusual, maybe one per cycle could be expected. But this time around, about 8 to 10 significant features, depending on how you count, have been…
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I Wasn't Allowed Prompting ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk: This Is Discrimination (2025)
By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University
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Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
The bottleneck has shifted from implementation to specification.
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