Recent content on The Nukemblog
Conventional wisdom is that AI coding raises the floor — that it allows mediocre engineers and even non-coders to be more productive. To some degree this is true, but when it comes to serious engineering projects it’s largely backwards. AI is making bad engineering expensive for the first time. I’m a consultant. I dive into codebases I’ve never seen and get productive faster than…
Johnnie Walker Black Label has a reputation for quality. It’s served at business dinners, gifted to clients, stocked by hotels that want to signal sophistication. The brand carries decades of accumulated prestige. It’s also not particularly good whisky. That’s not a bug — it’s the business model. Reputation is a lagging indicator. It reflects what a thing was , not what it…
This famous XKCD keeps popping into my mind as I watch Claude Code insisting on running stuff like find . -name "*.py" | xargs grep "function_name" across a fifty-thousand-line codebase, burning tokens like mad, waiting, waiting — when ctags could have answered in milliseconds. The crazy thing isn’t that Claude is doing it, it’s that people are watching the madness and approve…
As tensions between Iran, Israel, and the United States escalate, a familiar argument resurfaces in op-eds and think-tank threads: if only the decision-makers had real skin in the game — if generals’ sons were drafted, if politicians stood in the line of fire — they’d be far less eager for war. It’s an appealing theory. It’s also built on an assumption so large, and so…
An exoskeleton is a mechanical frame you wear that amplifies your physical strength. Strap one on and suddenly you can lift hundreds of kilos, work for hours without fatigue, accomplish physical feats impossible for an unaided human body. The military loves them. So do factories and logistics companies. But there’s a catch: use an exoskeleton long enough and your muscles atrophy. Your body…
Economists love to talk about government deficit spending as “borrowing money from the future.” It’s a neat mental model that helps explain fiscal policy: we take on debt today to fund infrastructure, social programs, or whatever, and future taxpayers will pay it back. The model implies a simple trade-off between present and future consumption, mediated by interest rates and…
A long time ago I worked for a Porn company. As someone who grew up orthodox Jew and turned secular later in life, I had to consciously reorient my moral compass regularly; When a recruiter for that company contacted me I suspended my knee jerked “no” reaction and asked myself “why?” - it’s not like I hadn’t watched porn occasionally (I later learned to avoid…
Campfire roasted Marshmallow is a childhood classic. Everybody knows what Marshmallow tastes like… Or do they? Because, as it turns out, Marshmallow doesn’t contain any Marshmallow! Marshmallow confection was originally made from Marshmallow root (hence the name) but as food industry was moving to mass production the original recipe was changed to utilize widely available and cheap…
In one scene of the classic “Alice in Wonderland” movie, Alice encountered cards painting rose bushes. The fact is, miss: we planted the white roses by mistake. And, the queen, she likes them red. If she saw what we did, she’d raise a fuss and each of us would quickly lose his head. Alice in Wonderland [source] Unfortunately for the cards, the queen notices the paint and beheads them…
“No” is one of the most important yet underused word in our languages. It’s importance cannot be overstated, yet in our culture saying “no” is often considered a negative. Saying “no” is frowned upon, sometimes considered rude, unfriendly or even aggressive - and when you say “no” people get angry. As a result, some people are terrified of…
When I was a small boy I used to spend hours playing the “war” card game. The thing about this game is, it’s totally predictable and deterministic - each player gets a shuffled half of the deck and cards are extracted one by one in order. No chance or skill involved whatsoever and the result is completely determined by the pack you were dealt - we could just as well determine the…
In Israel it occasionally happens that someone declares himself “king of the Jews”, “messiah” or even the “reincarnation of Jesus Christ” - it’s quite common and has been dubbed the “Jerusalem Syndrome” . We have quite a few of these prophets, along with a healthy supply of self proclaimed gurus, rabbi’s and cult leaders with their…
One of the repeating motifs of recruiting in the software industry are mantras of “talent”: “We recruit the best talent”, “talent attracts talent”, “we value talent” and so on. Some companies have so called “head of talent”, “talent acquisition”, “talent development” professionals on their payroll - basically a…
One of the things that struck me the most when observing managers at work, and in particular newly instated managers, is how managers become more and more out of touch with the realities of work. There’s actually a lot of research on that from quite a bit of different perspectives. Safety research for example has interesting things to say about “work as imagined” and “work…
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. Dwight D. Eisenhower What would you give for the ability to predict the future? a lot I presume. Knowing the future (and being free to act on it) can make you rich, successful, almost indestructible. What would you give to know the future with 90% probability of being right? well, if you can…
No, engineers don’t suck at time estimates - and generally speaking humans are better estimators than what most people believe. This seems rather surprising given all we’ve heard about the problems of bad time estimations, projects going overboard, etc and of course, your personal experience with software time estimates. But if people are really bad at estimation, how does that fit…
Have you ever walked into an office and saw a huge flat screen on the wall displaying a dashboard with pretty graphs, or some other nice visualization showing some important looking numbers? Back when people still frequented offices, many had them. But have you ever wondered, what are they for? No engineer is looking at them, because when you are looking at data you want to interact with the data,…
In a world where anything has an API, everything is a software problem nukemberg My name is Avishai Ish-Shalom, AKA @nukemberg on Twitter. I’m a software/systems engineer and manager, working mainly in Operations and backend development. I was a developer advocate for ScyllaDB , an Engineer in Residence at Aleph VC , and prior to that I led a backend team at Wix.com . In a previous life I…
From meetup groups to job listings to titles on LinkedIn, full-stackers are all around. but for a term so prevalent it is surprisingly ambiguous. What is a “full-stack” developer? What does she do? What is the scope of her work? Does our company need one? Practical questions I imagine have crossed the minds of many VP R&Ds and CTOs. It would have been nice to have a common definition,…
Since I’ve abandoned Facebook my primary source of tech news has become Twitter and this week my feed is raging with two seemingly unrelated security/privacy incidents: Zoom’s zero day and Superhuman’s email tracking scandal . I write “seemingly”, because despite these being two very different companies operating in two different markets (Zoom in video conference…