Doug Slater

Petunia has never actually read xUnit Test Patterns.

Rigor should be proportional to risk.

In my last post, I argued why you should still type code by hand.

Do your eyes glaze over reading your own diffs?

A photo of a puzzle piece fitting into its place.

On March 26, 2024, a container ship collided with one of the piers of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Maryland.

Computer people have an old tradition of calling computers machines: The ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery Alan Turing's paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" introduced the Turing test We all recognize phrases like "machine code", "ma…

In 2016, Nike shook up the sport of road running with its elite Vaporfly 4% shoe.

There's more than one type of authority.

AI has dramatically broadened who can create software.

Venn diagrams showing that AI lets more people make software Everyone Can Make Apps Now, sort of All over the world, people who haven't written a line of code in their life are using chat bots and coding agents to code up their dream product or app.

A greenway and a sign that says "No Motor Vehicles".

Workers clean up LLM slop.

Books I am reading to uplevel my people skills In my last post, AI: Accelerated Incompetence1, I claimed that LLMs can't replace human software developers, but I also wrote "there are certainly things you can do to further differentiate yourself from an L…

The text in this essay was written without any use of AI.

Tech Risks mapped onto Business Metrics Introduction 5 months ago, Reddit user Agent_Aftermath posted in /r/AskProgramming: Why are so many companies so ambivalent or uncommitted to addressing tech-debt?

Space Shuttle Challenger, 1986.

Programming computers is hard because, as Hal put it, it isn't about programming, and it isn't about computers.

In the alum chat for Mirdin, someone posted the following question, "Would it be better to start teaching beginners functional or imperative programming first?"

I'm always in search of good metaphors for software design.