A blog about software, and anything else this software engineer finds interesting
As little as I like to admit it, LLMs are taking over software development (event though it doesn t seem to be going well). Now there s a push to automate every single step of the way, because us meatbags are just too slow at everything. These days, we have people running agents to create tickets, do the [ ]
I had to go through an AI course recently for work, which included a couple of homework assignments. The intent was that these would be company-specific, but because 1 of these had to be posted on GitHub, I have a version without internal data. That was the RAG assignment (probably the closest thing the AI [ ]
Over the course of learning Go, I ve come to like some aspects of the language. 1 of those is the defer statement. For those that aren t familiar with the language, defer queues up a function call for just before your current function exits. I ve found it similar in purpose to a finally statement in Java, [ ]
Recently, ClickUp joined the (very large) club of companies laying off tons of people and trying to say that it s bEcAuSe Of Ai. I had this sitting open for a while because there s a lot of stuff I wanted to comment, and while I was well underway of a Tweet (never X) thread (EDIT: linked [ ]
That title is a bit dramatic. I ve written infrastructure as code, pushed stuff to AWS, and supported it for over 10 years. I ve gotten a bug report in the morning and messaged the support engineer (via Hipchat, because that s how old I am) that afternoon to let him know the issue was fixed. But most [ ]
The movie Kingdom of Heaven has 1 of the best knighting scenes in cinema punctuating the knight s oath with a hard slap, because that s so you ll remember it. While software development doesn t come with quite the same haptic feedback, the fact is a lot of us have leveled up after getting metaphorically slapped around. It [ ]
I didn t spend as much time in 2025 working on my gift registry, so all I really have is a login flow and profile management. I am building out a test suite that seems to do a pretty good job of validating the code works (I ve only had a couple of bugs the automated tests [ ]
Have you ever been asked to help with something, agree to do it, only to find out your job is to just stand there and hold a flashlight while someone else does all the work? Then, when they re done, they thank you for the help? When you re a kid and get relegated to flashlight holder, [ ]
Yes, I know I missed the peak on renaming software terms, like changing the default trunk branch name from master to main, or the trend of renaming whitelist and blacklist to allowlist and blocklist, but I m also not trying to change how I talk because people are capable of stretching words until they get offended. [ ]
Not too long ago, Joel Spolsky s blog post about architecture astronauts hit my various consumption feeds, and it serves as a good reminder that, as fun as it is to make fun of product managers (and it is a lot of fun), they re also probably the most important people in software development. That may seem [ ]