Recent content on Annie Vella
A week ago I finished up at Westpac NZ. I was fortunate to spend the last few years there as a Distinguished Engineer , a role with an unusually wide and undefined remit. It was the perfect playground for a curious mind, giving me the freedom to think deeply about all sorts of interesting questions. The trouble is that there are only so many hours in the day, and it’s never enough for all…
This is the second post in a series I’m writing about the most interesting findings from my Masters research on the impact of AI on software engineering, as well as some of the thoughts I’ve had since. This one is about how AI made engineers feel more productive, and why that productivity might be masking something we should care about. The first post, The Middle Loop , focused on my…
Early in my career, I took a job as a software developer at a large consultancy. Turns out the work mostly involved fixing other people’s Access databases by right-clicking and hitting “repair”. I lasted about a month before I thanked them for the opportunity, handed in my resignation, and moved on. The point is: what you spend your time on defines what you think about. What you…
I’m writing this having just landed back in New Zealand after a very long journey home from Utah. On the final leg from Houston to Auckland, I found myself wedged between a retired industrial chemist and a theoretical physicist who was reading a C++ book. I couldn’t not say anything. We ended up in a brief conversation about the future of software engineers. He was learning memory…
Last year I wrote that 2024 was a “massive year” and that “even that feels like an understatement”. I had no idea what was coming. 2025 was bigger. It challenged me in ways I hadn’t expected, opened doors I didn’t know existed, and at times left me wondering how I was going to fit it all in. I felt constantly busy, rushing from one thought to another, building…
Writing has never come naturally to me - I was always a science and maths kid through and through. But many moons ago, my dad convinced me to take English in my final year of high school with words that have stuck with me ever since: “There’s no point having all that knowledge if you can’t communicate it” . Through blogging and speaking, I’ve been working on that, and…
In the years I’ve been building software, I’ve lived through more than a few waves. My first taste of code was in the mid‑80s, typing BASIC into a Commodore 64 where you couldn’t even save your work to a hard drive. In the mid‑90s, scripting in mIRC and hand‑rolling simple HTML sites felt cutting edge. The early 2000s were all about desktop apps, then web apps that suddenly got a…
When I came across a recent Harvard Business Review article on the hidden penalty of using AI at work, it wasn’t the AI part that stood out to me, even though I’m studying this very topic as part of my Master’s of Engineering. Yes, the AI findings were interesting, but what stopped me in my tracks was something else: the “competence penalty” women pay. The research…
A few weeks ago, I had a conversation that’s stayed with me. A colleague from another department said: “I’ve always been able to read and understand code, even debug it, but I could never write it.” Something about this revelation stayed with me. Most people I’ve met outside the software engineering world tend to describe code as unintelligible - like hieroglyphics. I…
The recent releases of Claude Code and OpenAI Codex caught my attention, but not for the reasons you might expect. I was puzzled by the enthusiasm they’ve generated. These are, after all, terminal tools. In an era where graphical IDEs dominate, with tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and VSCode evolving toward ever-more seamless integrations, like ‘ Design Mode ’, why are we getting…
We don’t talk enough about the feeling of learning something deeply - the slow, sometimes frustrating and painful process that forges real intuition. As software engineers, we know this feeling intimately. The slow burn of mastering a new concept or language. The pressure and anxiety of resolving your first production issue. The endless hours spent debugging a complex system that just won’t…
Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged. AI coding assistants aren’t just changing how we write software - they’re fundamentally transforming who we are . We’re shifting from creators to…
In an era where tech stacks grow ever more complex and teams become increasingly specialised, there’s profound wisdom to be found in looking back at simpler, more effective approaches. I’ve been meaning to write about my experience at Trade Me for years. Earlier this week, I attended the launch of Rowan Simpson ’s new book, How to Be Wrong . Rowan hired me into his team at Trade…
Earlier this year, Lovable celebrated their biggest milestone yet - more than 12,000 (!) new projects created in a single day. The very next day, they went down. The irony? Their success became their downfall. Each new project in Lovable requires a new GitHub repository, and this surge - thousands per day - put such strain on GitHub’s infrastructure that it risked affecting GitHub’s…
I’ve now spent a couple of months using Windsurf fairly regularly and I thought I’d share some of my experiences with it. To set the scene, I’m a software engineer with over 20 years experience. I have a degree in Computer Science and Math and spent the first half of my career in hands-on individual contributor roles across 7 industries and 4 countries. I would generally describe…
The concept of agentic AI absolutely fascinates me. An LLM on its own is already mind-blowing, but building much larger systems where hundreds of specialised LLMs work together as components, with yet another LLM orchestrating how it all works, is a whole other world. The possibilities for automation are endless. At the end of the day, software systems are just components stitched together to…
2024 was a massive year for me, and even that feels like an understatement. I pushed myself to my limits in many ways, but have enjoyed every second of it. After all, if you’re comfortable, you’re not growing, right? My passion for continuous learning kicked into overdrive these past couple of years, leading me down fascinating intellectual paths. Could it be that AI has helped make…
Apologies, this is a long one - clearly I’ve got a lot to say on this subject! It didn’t take long after ChatGPT was released for me to start seeing how fundamentally this technology could transform software engineering. Not just as another tool in our arsenal, but as something that could redefine what it means to be a software engineer entirely. The discourse around this has been…
We live in an era where rapid solutions are celebrated. The quicker we solve a problem, the more productive we appear. But what if, in our rush to get to a resolution, we’re missing the mark entirely? Albert Einstein’s timeless quote, “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it” , resonates deeply…
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