Recent links

I really like the "tech debt" metaphor. A lot of people don't, but I think that's because they either don't extend the metaphor far enough,...

Our company recently announced a fundraise. We were grateful for all the community support, but the Internet also raised a few of its colle...

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...

Why the 'junior developer' metaphor for LLMs creates dangerous expectations, and how the Monkey Paw framing from folklore leads to better decisions about...

A rigorous study found AI-assisted developers are 19% slower yet believe they're 24% faster. The gap reveals that AI is best understood as an exoskeleton —...

AI coding agents have made code production nearly free. Drawing on insights from Kent Beck, Paul Ford, and Simon Willison, this post argues that the value has...

Is security spending more tokens than your attacker?

LLMs will make more of your average stuff. And that's OK. Here's how average SQL beats fancy attribution models when your agent writes the queries.

Software's "Agile moment" has been and gone.

My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.

In this essay, Carson Gross discusses his advice to young people interested in computer science worried about the future given the advancements in AI.

Build Awesome is a rebrand of 11ty/Eleventy, backed by a successful $40k Kickstarter. But this attempt to monetize static site generators repeats the same...

Gotcha. Traitor. Snicker. Those were some of the reactions when people discovered that I was using an iPhone. I stand before you accused of using a competitor’s...

Today I was thinking about tests.

You may be proud of the application you just built and release to the world. But users will only use 20% of it and will despise the other 80. Your goal is to...

Some technical notes on how and why we moved from WordPress to Jekyll, a well-known static site generator (SSG).

Code is read more than written, code is run more than read. I think this line of thought can be extended beyond code-writing, and used as a rule of thumb to...

Five git commands that tell you where a codebase hurts before you open a single file. Churn hotspots, bus factor, bug clusters, and crisis patterns.

For eight years, I’ve wanted a high-quality set of devtools for working with SQLite. Given how important SQLite is to the industry1, I’ve long been puzzled that...

On AI agents, grunt work, and the part of science that isn't replaceable.