Recent content on Matt Rogish
It’s pretty clear we’re in the “disposable software era”. Plenty of blog posts chatting about it: The Disposable Software Era Disposable Software: How AI is Redefining What Software Means etc. Just google “ Disposable software ” For the most part, though, the examples referenced are about small, bespoke solutions to particular problems, often short-lived and/or…
# CONCEPTUAL PRE-TRAINING LOOP internet_documents = crawl_internet() internet_documents . each do | doc | # 1. Tokenize the entire document into an array of integers # In reality, this is done in chunks since the docs are probably too big. # ATFLLM (Ask The F.. LLM) to learn about different chunk sizes. tokens = tokenizer . encode(doc) # Inputs are tokens 0 to N-1 # ['The', 'capital', 'of',…
A Few Single-line Stories in Everyday Frustration “Hey Siri, what’s the weather tomorrow?” Looks like thunderstorms tomorrow. The high temperature will be 66 degrees, and low will be 33. So you go outside with an umbrella and a t-shirt only to realize that it’s nearly snowing when you’re out. Why? Because of a chart that looks like this: “Hey Siri, play…
Drowning in a Sea of Tokens It’s no secret that AI-produced slop is filling up social networks, websites, blogs, job search sites, homework. B2B marketers have completely clogged the internets here and - perhaps because they lack the confidence, or just value the convenience - I see clearly AI-produced “personal” content in Slack groups, newsletters, mailing lists and Discords of…
Memory Lane It seems somewhat fitting that now, March 11, 2026, almost three years ago to the day that OpenAI’s GPT-4 was released ( and almost three years after I asked GPT-4 my first recorded question I distinctly remember asking GPT3.5 to create a song about something in the style of Nine Inch Nails, but my ChatGPT.com history only goes back to March 27, 2023. Compare March 2023 with…
There’s a lot of churn in the AI/LLM/Agent space, but I’ve landed on an approach that reliably produces production-quality code for non-trivial work. The core insight is simple: use multiple LLMs to develop a solid architecture, then implement it through a phased crawl/walk/run approach. Getting the plan right before writing code is where most of the value is. Here’s how that…
Preamble I recently attended a small networking meetup of entrepreneurs and startup founders. About halfway through, the organizers invited people to give a small elevator pitch about what they’re working on and how they can help the group, and what help they need. As an ENFP I relish the opportunity to get up in front of people and share something and hopefully learn something in return.…
I’ve never been completely satisfied with my computer setup. Sure, the 2015 13” MacBook Pro I have is fine , it does what I need it to do. But as someone that travels a lot, it’s bulky and the battery life isn’t that great, and outside of this blog and some side projects, I don’t really do any software development. Nothing that remotely taxes the machine, aside from occasionally compiling new…
After upgrading to Gigabit FiOS, I recently setup a series of eero devices in my house, replacing a couple of non-meshed Netgear routers. It wasn’t incredibly obvious how to setup a wired backhaul and so I thought y’all could use some quick pointers, as I got it wrong a few times.
Remote work is in the news again. Oh, boy.
A few days ago I came across this article from Indiehackers (a really cool site!) called “How to Come Up with Profitable Online Business Ideas” . It’s basically a giant list of folks that built something describing their process, which I guess is helpful to some degree, but ultimately feels like it misses the mark. It opens with: Interested in building a startup, or starting your…
I recently had some time to myself (a rarity nowadays!) as I was doing a few transcon flights, so I picked up the new book on Theranos ( Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup ). I just finished the book - it’s a great read with a lot of interesting, painful lessons. Silicon Valley’s VC “Cult of Personality” venerates the unstoppable, delusional young founder that builds the…
I was browsing the Twitterscape and saw this tweet: Ultimately, SemVer is a false promise that appeals to many developers — the promise of pain-free, don’t-have-to-think-about-it, updates to dependencies. But it simply isn’t true. **jashkenas**, Why Semantic Versioning Isn't - https://gist.github.com/jashkenas/cbd2b088e20279ae2c8e Mercifully I’ve been able to ignore Semver for a…
274 years The population of Manhattan is roughly 1.5 million people. On the weekend. On a weekday, the population doubles to 3 million people. Almost two million people commute from outside the city. Each work day. Their commute time is, on average, 48 minutes each way . For 1.5 million people, who spend 96 minutes a day commuting, that’s 144,000,000 total minutes. 2,400,000 hours. 100,000…
🚩 This was written before AI changed everything. In a previous post, I outlined a general strategy to interview programmers . Today, I’ll be more specific, including examples and rationales, on how to hire Ruby/Rails developers.
New software projects start the same way: clean, well-tested, and fresh in everyone’s minds. Over time, however, the knowledge fades as little-visited parts of the code aren’t touched, folks move to other projects, and new developers come on board. Test coverage drops. Mass hysteria . Without automated, enforced quality and test coverage metrics, entropy wins and you get stuck in a…
30 years ago , Steve Jobs and Apple unveiled the Macintosh . Most people have seen that video, but I bet most haven’t seen the one he filmed eight years later, demoing the latest version of his new operating system, NeXTSTEP3.0. Fascinating to see the Mac heritage in NeXTSTEP carry through the acquisition and transformation into OS X. It’s hard to remember, but in 1992 Microsoft had…
In the software business, most folks work in an office. Maybe a quiet, private one, or one of the dastardly open plan ones. But not usually, say, a sports arena. Or in a moving vehicle. Sometimes, this fact is lost on the people making the software. They design buttons that are washed out when the surveyor on a phone or tablet views it outside in the sun. Or they use too many external libraries in…
How winners win: John Boyd and the four qualities of victorious organizations I’ve read “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War” and it has changed how I look at problems. Finding my own OODA loop has been instrumental at improving my success in my work. His four qualities might help improve yours.
Is this what it’s supposed to feel like? I just got an email from an engineering prospect who has decided to turn down our offer. We put so much time and effort and passion into recruiting him. He decided he wants to go off and start his own company right now. I think more and more startup CEOs (and hiring managers) are figuring this out. At least, I’m telling every one I meet - for…
The Death of Expertise Having equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge. It assuredly does not mean that “everyone’s opinion about anything is as good as anyone else’s.” And yet, this is now enshrined as the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense. Tom Nichols makes a point that we in technology have known / identified for a long…
🚩 This was written before AI changed everything. I’ve posted a follow up with more specifics on “How to Interview Programmers Part 2” Google has finally come clean that they figured out what many of us have been repeating for years: brain teasers in interviews don’t lead to measurably better employee outcomes.
I travel quite a bit. As such, I have a membership to my preferred airline’s lounge. It provides a nice quiet space away from the blaring security announcements and inane airport CNN. The airline has recently spent a lot of money renovating the lounge network to give it a “fresh” look-and-feel. I think it looks sort of tacky, but the one thing they got right happened in the…
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. Aldous Huxley, "Proper Studies", 1927 In my last post, I discussed why software effort estimation was harmful . I mentioned that you can’t add up all the individual tasks to get a completion date at some arbitrary point in the future, and you can’t (with some caveats) use estimation to “staff up” a project from the…
Dal73. Delta Air Lines tells me it will take two hours and twenty-five minutes to fly from New York City to Atlanta, GA. American says two thirty. United? Two thirty-four. Yet, the captain just told me it was “one-hour forty-five” minutes “wheels-up to wheels-down”. What gives? It turns out that the US Department of Transportation (US DOT) rates the airlines by…
A few weeks ago I wrote a post lamenting the lack of standardized project bootstrapping. Several of the commenters suggested Vagrant , so I have spent the last week or so giving it a try. Challenge accepted. Here is what’s awesome about Vagrant: Uses Chef or Puppet to add packages to a base VM Easily maintain and rebuild VMs Pretty straightforward install process on OS X, Linux, and Windows…
Last night I had the following exchange on Twitter: Devsetuptwitter. Having just jumped on board to a newish Django project here at work , I feel their pain. Although I don’t know the Django ecosystem as well as Rails, I do know that projects should contain a readme, and I shouldn’t have to: execute server runner install missing lib or package that it complained about goto: 1 until…
There is a big brouhaha because Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg “admits … walk[ing] out of this office every day at 5:30”. Oh, the shock and horror . The wailing and gnashing of teeth . Why is this news? Why do folks think that working gobs and gobs of hours, as software developers, leads to better software, faster? Sure, for something repetitive and methodological like…
Or: Every Developer Gets an Amex How often does this happen where you work: Developer begs, pleads with boss to go to technical conference Boss negotiates with developer on getting a cheaper hotel. (It’s only $69 a night! Clean sheets optional. 30 minute bus ride from conference. What a steal!) Boss orders developer to get cheaper, three stop flight instead of more expensive non-stop…
There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back. DeMarco & Lister , Peopleware How does a large software project get to be one year late? Answer: One day at a time! Brooks , The Mythical Man-Month Apple Store Upper West Side It’s trendy right now to produce office space that looks like an Apple store. Bright, airy, cheerful, lots of open space, big…