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The price of software is going to zero. AI assisted programming makes it much faster and cheaper to build software. On the scale of the software market this means that most of what is currently consumer paid software will become free software. Prior to AI only large hyperscalers could afford to offer truly free software. Gmail has been free since its inception. Fastmail charges $60/year for a…
The fundamental mechanic of cloud computing is that it pools usage across hardware. Canonically, Netflix had peak traffic in the evening when people watch tv shows, and much less traffic the rest of the day. If they had built their own data centers they would need 5x the hardware to serve peak traffic compared to their average. Doing so would have been super expensive so they used AWS EC2 instead.
Moving the blog to Hugo It’s time to move the blog off of wordpress. The current hosting setup crashes regularly. And frankly, I have no desire to figure out why. When I originally launched the blog I hoped to make money off of it. So I used wordpress and setup a mailing list. That dream never materialized. If you want to get updates I recommend setting up your RSS reader to track the blog.
Long ago digital calculators did not exist. Instead offices full of humans spent their days doing mathematics on slide rules assisted by charts of logic tables. The invention of the mainframe and eventually the digital pocket calculators eliminated those jobs. Yet today our civilization does more calculation than ever before. It just doesn’t involve humans in offices. Today we face another cliff.…
With AI investment arguably exceeding $1 trillion over the last few years many people are concerned about a bubble. Unlike the constant doomsayers claiming ‘AI has peaked’ despite the last improvement being released a week ago, a bubble could be a concern. But frankly I don’t think we are in that much of a bubble. Anthropic has revenues around 7 billion a year at this point. Google has been…
Anthropic just released a report on a sophisticated Claude Code and MCP based hacking ring. Based on their estimates humans provided less than 10% of the decision making for the operation. The hack involved multiple requests per second to Anthropic APIs across dozens of ‘agents’. The attackers managed to infiltrate several technology firms and exfiltrated credentials.…
The “@grok is this true” phenomenon On X users often reply to a post with “@grok is this true” which triggers Elon’s LLM to respond to their post. As UX go it works pretty well. The problem is that people use it for the most mundane questions. It really emphasizes how little the average person knows about things. Even worse people attempt to use “@grok is this true” in online arguments. I’ve also…
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of coding using the AI Agent Claude Code. It is a terminal application which allows you to chat to it live while it attempts to code whatever you direct it to. My game Forward Blaster https://github.com/Sevii/forward-blaster was written by AI except for a few places where I edited constants. Needless to say the game includes a lot of loops. But I didn’t write any of…
I released a short demo of AI assisted vibe coding to the youtube channel. Basic games like this are one of my favorite use cases for vibecoding. LLMs are pretty good at it and the pay off is quick. Back in my teens I tried to learn programming to make games. I’d have gotten a lot farther if we’d had AI then instead of trying to figure out C++ from a two inch think book!
In 2023 I was one of the many software engineers whose management pushed them into trying Github Copilot. I was not impressed. At the time Copilot was basically pointless for Java developers. IntelliJ already had Intellisense which did everything Copilot did, but more deterministically. In retrospect autocomplete was not the use case for AI to assist in the programing process. Personally, I find…
https://codewithoutlearningtocode.com I’m working on a new book on Vibe Coding for people who don’t know how to code. Using LLMs to build simple programs unlocks a lot of programming ability for people who either tried and failed to learn to program or never got started. You no longer need to learn the basics of programming logic or syntax to build useful programs to solve your problems. The…
LLMs are at the point where they can reduce toil for software engineers across a host of use cases. Here we will explore a few I’ve thought of. Reduces time spent on toil Resize this button -> AI Refactor this function -> AI Connect these endpoints -> AI Write more tests -> AI Add more comments -> AI Create PlantUML diagrams from a sketch -> AI First pass code reviews -> AI Reduces time…
If you’ve ever worked with PlantUML or Mermaid before it’s easy to forget the domain specific language used to build the diagrams. You sketch out your whiteboard diagram, discuss it with coworkers and are ready to start on your architecture document only to sit there stumped trying to remember how to convert your drawing into PlantUML. Well the good news is that Claude can do it for…
Great article on mac setup Lots of tools are outdated by default. Got to take advantage of this blog post since I got a new laptop this summer. https://matt.sh/setup-2021-late Operating Systems use out of date assumptions Interesting talk on how modern systems on a chip differ from how we imagine computers to actually work. Over the last two decades hardware has gradually abstracted away many…
Fine grained services Microservices have been the thing for over 15 years. They are great in large companies with CI/CD environments. But as your situation drifts farther away from the ideal microservice use case traps abound. **Building a new service for one endpoint ** If you find yourself having a conversation where you need to create a new endpoint somewhere, but adding it to any of your…
Key Performance Indicators are a common business practice. They are a quantifiable measure of performance for a specific objective. Occasionally, I am asked to create my own KPIs as an individual contributor. I think it is a bit strange, after all I work for the company, you’d think they would tell me what the KPIs are! Ideally we want to avoid metrics which are created arbitrarily by team…
We are in a phase where planning becomes quite difficult. ChatGPT has started a capitalistic AI war. Microsoft swept in to shepherd commercialization. Google is on the back foot for now. Amazon will launch something I have no doubt. ChatGPT style tech would make Alexa viable by solving the fractal conversation problem. The players are moving, immense amounts of capital has been unleashed. But for…
In practice ‘agile’ means ‘we have no process in place and each team does whatever random thing the manager wants to try next’. Sometimes that is SAFE sometimes its SCRUM, usually it’s a combination of different things. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there are trade offs. The first is standardization. If every team follows a different process it’s difficult to…
A business process is any procedure that is done manually by employees. In the software engineering environment this includes everything from code reviews to standup and 1 on 1s. Compliance with processes involves education, incentives and punishments. People need to know about the process to follow it. And if you don’t attach incentives to the process, negative or positive, people won’t feel a…
For the next sledgeconf we will focus on software architecture success stories. What does architecture success mean? Software architecture is the way we structure our software programs. A successful architecture enables us to support user requests, integrate improvements all while making it easy for the engineers working on the project. A bad architecture has to fail in some major way. It might…
I’ve had a conversation where someone proposes trying a new language like Go or Scala or Typescript for new development several times. Typically, the argument is that we have problems x, y and z with our current language and they would all be better under $new_language. The arguments are always things like x has better performance, y has better typing, z is more functional. There is no free lunch…
In my conceptualization a low tier software engineering culture is one where engineers have low wages, low accountability, little responsibility and little control over the software development lifecycle. In my experience this is typically due to economic reasons more so than ineptitude. One example is specification work for hardware integration projects. This article talks about how a culture of…
The internet isn’t the best place to learn software architecture. While you can quickly read about dozens of novel ways to structure software applications the internet tends to pull people towards poor solutions. Software architectures are ways of structuring software to support various demands. - development speed - hardware platform (web, mobile, point of sale, drone, etc) - team structure -…
Quite good science fiction novella. https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581 Standford Hates fun https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2022/12/stanford-hates-fun.html I noticed something similar to the no-fun policy at Standford. But I can’t say if it was because of bureaucracy or simply the schools I went to. My freshman year I went to Saint John’s College in Santa Fe studying liberal arts. The school was…
ChatGPT https://chat.openai.com/chat came out last week and I figured I may as well experiment with it a bit. The below is 100% output from ChatGPT. I’ve removed the prompts but otherwise have not edited it at all. This is based on a short story I’ve been working on in the traditional way of writing. The Dragon Slayer’s apprentice Erlich is a monster hunter. Working for the crown…
Previously published as a PDF **Code Review Handbook:** Code Review Basics How do you do a code review? Typically, I get an email from bitbucket or Github saying “Adam added you as a reviewer on ‘SMB-1182-larger-buttons’” . This is probably the 10th PR of the day, it is a constant stream. Often there is a 20 file PR that I just do not want to get started on. This is the industry standard PR…
Real time analytics article https://adamsinger.substack.com/p/demystifying-real-time-analytics?utm_source=url&s=r Danluu on the issues with purchasing solutions. https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ Nuclear Stuff https://austinvernon.site/blog/nuclear.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html Are we really engineers? https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
I’ve uploaded the videos from the 2022 SledgeConf to the youtube channel! Feel free to take a look. This gives you a good idea of how SledgeConf works in practice. Planning your Cloud Migration - Jay Manning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSXVGlVfqn8 Practical Software Estimation - Nicholas Sledgianowski https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHdOldaXtYQ
Static vs Dynamic Configuration There are two main types of configuration static and dynamic. The main difference is in how the configuration is consumed by your services. Static configuration is immutable in the life time of an instance of your service. The service can read it once on startup and safely assume it will never change. Dynamic configuration is mutable in the life of a service…
4:30PM Pacific Time https://sledgeconf.dev Hey, I’m bringing back Sledgeconf on July 15th. We have two talks this time ‘Planning your Cloud Migration’ and ‘Practical Software Estimation’. “Planning your Cloud Migration” Jay Manning joins us again to talk about planning and executing Cloud Migrations. Jay has extensive experience with AWS partners working through their Cloud journey. “Practical…
AWS Athena is a managed big data query system based on S3 and Presto. It supports a bunch of big data formats like JSON, CSV, Parquet, ION, etc. Schemas are applied at query time via AWS Glue. To get started with Athena you define your Glue table in the Athena UI and start writing SQL queries. For my project I’ve been working on heavily nested JSON. The schema for this data is very involved so I…
We all want to have good longterm software architecture. Build it right the first time. But some organizations fall into the trap of trying to get a perfect design before they start building. They include more stakeholders, try to plan for contingencies, develop a high availability strategy. Those things are all good to have. But you don’t need them before you have users. If you have no users you…
People have extended the goal of building micro service systems such that we aren’t locked into a language to a new goal of every repository being able to use any language. It’s phrased as ‘shouldn’t we use the best language for the job.‘ But the implication is that we should be able to pick a language for this new project independent of the rest of our existing software stack. The problem is that…
Away team work is a critical component of high performance software organizations. It is a way for high priority teams to work around other teams’ manpower constraints to deliver software. Without a well established culture of away team project work your organization will default to a standard of ‘shut up and wait while your item is in the backlog’. What is away team work exactly? Away team work…
At Amazon I had the chance to watch a monolithic service reach the point where it had to be split up into microservices. When I started we had about thirty software engineers contributing to our service. We had the great idea of developing a framework to speed up feature delivery for everyone in Alexa Shopping. The framework ended up working and the number of people contributing code to our…
We often see posts on hacker news about how Amazon charges an insane markup for hosting or data transfer, or anything. Then someone will post a comparison where they price out an equivalent amount of hardware and show that it would cost 1/5th or 1/10th the cost. They then assume, obviously, hiring an IT department that can run this hardware is an achievable goal. Sorry, no it’s not achievable.…
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QB8T6T9 The collection is out now! I’ve finally released my collection Collected Sledgeworx on amazon. I started blogging to share my thoughts and vent frustrations. My first blog was about futurism and politics, my second on fitness, my third was Sledgeworx.io. I ended up being much better at a writing about software than anything else. In this book I have…
Seviipay is a SAAS startup I launched in Summer 2021. The idea was to bring best in class UI/UX to native cryptocurrency payments. Basically the stripe of cryptocurrency payments. The MVP worked on mobile and desktop just for Ethereum. I did a few product discovery calls without getting any buyers.. Eventually the project kind of stalled and I moved on to other projects. The big thing here was…
There is a lot of discussion of Web3 lately. Is it a scam? Is decentralized finance Web3? Will Web3 destroy Web2? In this blog post we will talk about what Web3 is now and what Web3 allows us to build tomorrow. **What is Web3 now? ** Right now Web3 is a technology paradigm which supports two main types of services Decentralized Finance (Defi) and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). A lot of online…
Hey, everyone I’m working on an NFT project. Originally, I wanted to get programmer NFTs for the team at Guava Labs. I wanted to do something like Coders waiting for Compilers , but that didn’t have enough pizazz. Then I was talking to some NFT artists and seeing if we could sell them a website with web3 components to tie into their NFT projects, but none of them were ready to go. So I ended up…
The American workforce has been operating in a post-Organization Man https://www.amazon.com/Organization-Man-William-H-Whyte/dp/0812218191 manner since the 1990s when outsourcing ended the job security paradigm. The current paradigm ‘millenial’ (1990-2020), expects workers to work for a single company at a time. The corporation provides the buildings, furnishes the offices, provides all the tools…
Fall into SledgeConf November 5th 2021 4:30PM Pacific Time! This quarter we have Jay Manning presenting on working with recruiters, negotiating offers and more! I will also be presenting on Big Software and Big Tech! This SledgeConf should be a bit more relaxed since we will only have 2 speakers. https://sledgeconf.dev
**** The American workforce has been operating in a post-Organization Man https://www.amazon.com/Organization-Man-William-H-Whyte/dp/0812218191 manner since the 1990s when outsourcing ended the job security paradigm. The current ‘millenial’ paradigm (1990-2020), expects workers to work for a single company at a time. The corporation provides the buildings, furnishes the offices, provides all the…
I set up Oauth2 authentication with Zapier for Seviipay.com recently and figured it was worth a short post on the gotchas I encountered. The biggest problem I had was with the Refresh token configuration. I would do a test connection, validate that I wanted to give Zapier access, send a test notification and it would work. Then an hour later I get an email from Zapier that they got a 401 error and…
I’m working on a new project. Seviipay is a software as a service project through which I hope to make blockchain integration easy for everyone. It is in free alpha launch right now and you can check it out at www.seviipay.com . Why blockchain integration? And why now? I first got involved with Ethereum back in 2015 before the network went live. It was a fun toy then and I spent some time getting…
“ two is better than zero **” is definitely harmful. ** The phrase “two is better than zero” - Jeff Bezos drives a lot of the technical disfunction inside of Amazon. I typically explain it to people by saying “ Amazon has 3 internal tools for every job with one tool’s worth of documentation ”. Which is basically true, for every problem internally we have 0-3+ tools to tackle it. When our team…
I have been thinking about the problems in software a bit lately. As I see it we have 2 core issues, the first is the diseconomies of scale in software. The more and bigger the software, the more it costs to develop. The second issue is software security and maintenance. Diseconomies of scale are an issue because we keep writing more software. And the expectations of that software continue to…
Lots of links this round. I’ve had a lot of time to surf around the interwebz and came across a number of belief updating thoughts. Overall these updates make me feel very optimistic about the future. Watch out for the Zircon 5 though! A Chemical Hunger Why is everyone so fat these days? Is it just because humans are lazy gluttons? This series of posts dives into possible chemical factors to…
Despite it being the age of social media, I get a lot of my content via RSS. I have the mac Reeder app which lets me subscribe to blogs. It is nice because without RSS I will see a blogger on Hacker News or reddit, enjoy their post and then their next post won’t be on the front page so I won’t see it. RSS fixes that because I can read their post and if I enjoy it, subscribe to their RSS feed.
A software daemon is some bit of software that runs independently of human control. We have been creating them for most of computing history. But the majority are not that important. Nobody knows their names. Nobody really cares that much if they have bugs. If one stops working you restart it and move on with your life. Cryptocurrency blockchains are also daemons. Each blockchain is just software…