I am a Staff Software Developer working across languages and teams. I write about the technical and cultural challenges of software development.
In the image above (transcript below), I asked an LLM to "tell me a fun fact," it responded with a somewhat correct fact that was a bit mundane, perhaps because I know more about owls than this language model does. But this is a good example of understanding
reading-list
Software Development Is Engineering Strategy Useful? There’s always a strategy, even if it isn’t written down. The single biggest act you can take to further strategy in your organization is to write down strategy so it can be debated, agreed upon, and explicitly evolved. Is engineering strategy useful?
ai
AI hype has created plenty of fear about being replaced by robot overlords, which has made me ask myself: What are the essential, non-replaceable parts of our jobs?
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[A] “good hack” was some feat of technical virtuosity undertaken for pure pleasure rather than necessity, like programming a mainframe the size of a dozen refrigerators to play a song. ― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes A good hack! This passage sent me down a rabbit hole of research on good hacks I
organizational culture
Problems that matter are problems business leaders care about. Learn what your business leaders care about and look at your work through their eyes.
ai
AI is changing my job and yours, and it is a reflection of the failings of our socio-cultural and technical systems. These are two conclusions I've come to in my deep dive into AI developer tools in the past two weeks. And I'm not alone: * Test
reading-list
On Engineering Chip Huyen on Pitfalls When Building Gen AI This is a great post if you're asking "should I use AI for that?" Use generative AI when you don't need generative AI This pitfall is so common when technologies are new. I love
ai
Big surprise. AI is not neutral. Hyperallergic recently reported that DeepSeek refused to answer questions about Ai WeiWei. I've tried this myself with Ai WeiWei and Tank Man and DeepSeek at first suggested it couldn't help but with a few careful prompts it appeared to know
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I am beginning to think that the failings of AI are a reflection of the failings of our own socio-cultural systems. The paper linked below outlines critical thinking motivators and inhibitors when using AI. People are motivated to think critically when they desire to improve work quality, avoiding negative outcomes
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Working with AI will mean that we can focus on outcomes, systems design, and nuanced test cases,
ai
If you had asked me how AI has changed my work a few months ago, I would have said that I get a few tedious tasks done faster and use it for a bit of research, but my job hasn't changed much otherwise. In the past month, I
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LLMs Need Context, Just Us Context. I need context to understand what you're talking about. Give me a one line Jira ticket and I'll spend the next half hour finding context and probably pestering you for more information. Once I have that, I'll probably