Posts on For my friendgineers

While we’re all thinking about LLMs and Coding Genies, here’s something to think about.

I was staring at a PR the other day.

I’ve heard it said that there’s no problem in computer science that can’t be solved by another level of indirection.

Here’s something I ran across on the interwebs the other day.

There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.

I’m traveling on business this week.

One of the people I regularly ready is Tim Ottinger.

On the topic of leading with the why, emotions are important.

As I heard in marching band, don’t practice until you get it right, practice until you can’t get it wrong.

Positional power is an interesting thing.

With all due respect to Mike Meyers as Wayne Campbell, I saw something on the internet and the only possible response was Exsqueeze Me?.

I’ve talked about a messy middle before, but that’s not the only messy middle.

As I’ve noted before, while I’ve worked all over the computing stack, from simulation for games and requirements analysis to 3D rendering to fleet management to tools, I’ve spent the last 15 years or so working down in the engine room.

Culture isn’t just for yogurt and sourdough.

I’ve talked about doc culture before.

As CEO and Co-Founder of Honeycomb, Charity Majors has a lot to say about observability.

A long time ago I talked about distributed systems superpowers.

Speaking of writing for the maintainer, what about coding assistants?

I’ve written about this before.

If AI isn’t the answer, what is?

Or at least someone told you they did.

I’ve said before that as developers we read more than we write.

I’ve touched on the importance of listening to your data before, but I decided that the topic is worth revisiting.

Performance is important.

Hot Take.

Closing out this series1, the third most common reason I’ve seen thrown around for why software engineering isn’t real engineering is: Real engineers have a license.

The other day I talked about the #1 excuse people use when they say software engineering isn’t engineering, that software has no constraints.

Over the years I’ve seen many people say that software engineering isn’t real engineering.

Move fast and break things.

A long time ago, in a country far away from, the government released guidelines.

When you’re writing code you have lots of choices.

The other day I ran across a really interesting quote.

Unsurprisingly, there are hundreds of quotes about computers and programming by Edsger Dijkstra, and almost all of them are worthy of a post (or two).

Back when I worked on boxed products at Microsoft, we had 2-year release cycles.

The other day I ran into a quote on the internet about the problem with emergency procedures.

Hiring has been on my mind lately.

As seen on the internet People over process.

I’ve subscribed to Kent Beck’s Tidy First substack, and there’s lots of useful info there.

I’ve mentioned the Tyranny of Or many times, I talked directly about it four years ago, and I stand by what I said.

Here’s a question for you.

Adding to my book reviews, consider Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom.

I’ve talked about Type I (False Positive) and Type II (False Negative) errors before.

A while ago I talked about Strong Opinions, Loosely Held.

I’ve talked about the different kinds of tests.

I’ve talked about code smells before.

Motivation is a funny thing.

I’ve talked about comments in the past.

I’ve talked about ownership before.

Tales from the real word today.

Speaking of remodeling updating your code, If you’re releasing a new version of your code, that means you’ve already released a version of your code.