Dudley.Codes

Programming today is stressful — way more stressful than I remember it in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just starting out.

Advice for leaders who find themselves in the relentless middle Everyone in a leadership role is actually fulfilling several roles simultaneously, constantly re-balancing and re-prioritizing to support competing imperatives.

Successful people tend to be persistent.

A lot of frontend teams are very convinced that rewriting their frontend will lead to the promised land.

As someone who’s been in the tech industry for more than 15 years, I’ve come to recognize a fundamental truth about being a software dev: the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture.

“The word for world is forest” — Ursula K.

Luck plays such a big role in the world.

Do you often append “reddit” or “wiki” to your Google search queries?

Broken windows theory is a popular idea from the world of criminology.

In Big Agile, engineering = new features.

1/ I’ve been mega-obsessed with this feeling.

The amount of AI-generated content is beginning to overwhelm the internet.

It’s one of those anachronisms that is deeply embedded in modern technology.

The problem with software is that it’s too powerful.

I often hear agency talked about as if it’s an inherent trait: Either someone has it or they don’t – in which case, too bad, they’re doomed to a life in the minor leagues.

The Shirky principle is the adage that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”.

We were supposed to release this feature three weeks ago.

About five years ago, for seven dollars, I bought an old citrus juicer at a thrift shop.

Code is read more than written This phrase is, by now, common programmer knowledge, a reminder that the person first writing a piece of code shouldn’t buy convenience at the expense of the people who will have to read it and modify it in the future.

The following examples happen regularly at all levels of all kinds of companies: A manager asks a direct report “can you do X?”

I heard two great lines recently applied to CEOs that are thought provoking when you look at them together: You have to care about everything more than anything and You can do anything you want but not everything you want Being a CEO means you are account…

One of the wisest and most important pieces of advice I received as a startup founder was this: “The worst outcome is a mediocre success”.

For a book proposal I am currently working on (German, no proposal isn’t done yet because I keep reworking stuff, my agent hates me) I am thinking a lot about late stage capitalism and technologies, about how the kinda terminal economic system shapes the…

It’s easy to want something.

Readability is often treated as a subjective thing.

There’s an increasing chasm dividing the modern web.

The next time you start on a major project, I want you to write code for a couple of days and then delete it all.

I’ve worked in computer systems software — operating systems, virtualization, storage, networks, and security — for my entire career.

In World War II, the story goes, the British invented a new kind of onboard radar that allowed its pilots to shoot down German planes at night.[1] They didn’t want the Germans to know about this technology, but they had to give an explanation for their ne…

Summary My first hype exposure was “use the Extensible Markup Language for everything”.

A few seconds ago I was staring a blank page, right before I started to put down the first bullet points that will eventually turn into this thing that you’re reading right now.

A number of students have asked me for strategies to “stay consistent”.

Introduction In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid took the unusual step of hiring a market research firm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Technical debt is easily the most used buzzword these days.

At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the last few years), sits a cancerous problem with the fabric of how capital is deployed in modern business.

I recently realized that all the various programming philosophies are concerned with state, and can be boiled down into a simple statement about how to work with state.

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

What creates a fulfilling existence?

Sometimes we talk about “velocity” in software, as “how many story points can we do in a sprint”–er, I mean “the rate at which a development team consistently delivers business value.”

I’m just so angry.

Lately there have been quite a few announcements around WebAssembly, such as the Docker+Wasm Technical Preview.

One of the things I occasionally get paid to do by companies/execs is to tell them why everything seemed to SUDDENLY go wrong, and subs/readers dropped like a stone.

The IKEA effect describes how people come to overvalue things in which they have successfully put effort into.

I was recently interviewed by NPR’s Planet Money regarding a particular form of credit card fraud.

Most of our tasks work like a wave.

I’m a big fan of “advice posts” and productivity guides.

The most surprising thing is that you wouldn’t let anyone steal your property, but you consistently let people steal your time, which is infinitely more valuable.

Cutting out the news has been one of the best lifestyle decisions I’ve made in recent years, second only to cutting out social media (though the two are not mutually exclusive).