Paul Hammant's blog

Note: By “dumb” I don’t mean badly designed.

A few days ago I wrote about build-time AI vs run-time AI, after the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat in Engelberg - three days in June, convened by Martin Fowler and Thoughtworks, following an earlier gathering in Utah in February.

I was at a ThoughtWorks “The Future of Software Engineering” event in Switzerland some weeks ago.

For years I’ve contrasted depth-first recursive build technologies (Maven, Gradle, MSBuild) with directed acyclic graph (DAG) ones (Blaze/Bazel, Buck, Nx).

Context is Trunnk-Based Development with Branch for Relase, and cherry picking.

A colleague suggested the cherry-picking way for trunk-based-development with branch for release needs worked examples cos there are foot-guns.

Nobody cares about a thing in the tech world until it is successful, and I have something here that could be, but isn’t yet.

This article is a comprehensive 2025 update to the original 2006 post: “Did you send this - another weapon against spam?”

Problem: uploading your resume/CV to a job portal should yield a perfectly parsed CV but often does not.

The Problem: Running Random GitHub Code Safely As developers, we frequently encounter interesting GitHub repositories, development tools, or scripts that we want to test.

Repo: github.com/RexxJS/RexxJS/ Yes, Mike Cowlishaw’s interpreted language from 1979 that’s line-centric, starts indexes at 1 not 0, where vars are “weak” & global dominant, which isn’t OO or functional, and has a dangerous “eval” equivalent.