14 links
I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected patches. I believed that if I just laid out the logic clearly enough, the other person would have no choice but to come around. Truth would win.
When Claude drives you off the cliff
How an obsession with KPIs at Orange led people to game them, slowing service delivery to a crawl. A cautionary tale about Goodhart's law.
Coding agents as normal technology
In an industry that pressures developers to always be shipping side-projects, it can be helpful to be retrospective with the projects that don't make the cut
Read this, come on
Criticism can prevent mistakes. It can never create value. Only ideas can do that. The two are not equal contributions, and most meetings get this backwards.
Discover insightful advice for young people, emphasizing choices, confidence, and personal growth through lived experiences.
Lessons learned from 14 years of engineering at Google, focusing on what truly matters beyond just writing great code.
How to reset the thermostat, and CodeRabbit as a case study
The one skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else isn’t technical. It’s the ability to take ambiguous problems and make them concrete.Retry
We all want to do awesome things and make an impact at work. However, what we call “work” is a relationship between employer and employee that's inherently and persistently designed to benefit the former over the latter. How do we meaningfully contribute, earn a living, and maybe even enjoy ourselves when the organization simply does not care about us?
A decade of firsthand advice on going from an employed software developer to successful indie hacker running your own business(es).
