Blog about software engineering, and how it makes life easier.
Modern AI tools can produce polished prose and clean-looking code, but polish is not proof of alignment. In this post, I argue that we should treat LLMs as an alien mind: useful, fast, and often insightful, yet fundamentally opaque. The safest path is applied paranoia: distrust, test, verify, and never ship what you do not understand.
I like to read but, sometimes, I don’t have time to read everything I’d like and I still want the information I could gain by listening to someone – or something – read for me while I’m driving, for example. I had a document like that about a week ago that I wanted to read, but just didn’t have time for: it wasn’t for work so I couldn’t read it there, and I had a rather long drive ahead of me. I’m…
If you’ve been using the blytkerchan/build-paper GitHub Action and recently noticed a missing or stale reference, this post is for you.
We are living in a time when most of the software we use on a daily basis is written by hand using archaic, hand-crafted tooling. The tools, practices, and methods developers use on a daily basis are taught to them by the “masters” of the trade in the modern equivalent of apprenticeships. The modern equivalent of guilds, engineering orders and associations like the IEEE, ACM, and OIQ here in…
About two years ago, I posted on this blog, expressing a concern that has since only grown.
In many ways, making certain tasks too easy too quickly can have its own pitfalls.
The Ukrainian government announced on May 1 that they would use a “digital person” to represent the ministry of foreign affairs for at least some of their announcements. It (she?) will be a representative for the ministry on consular affairs and is called “Victoria Shi”, which refers to Ukraine’s goal of victory in their war with Russia (or perhaps rather Russia’s war on them) and the fact that…
Interoperability is the scourge of all information systems: knowing what data means, how it is formatted, and what the semantics of the various fields are can be a daunting task. Micro-services are generally designed to process messages in potentially large quantities and, in order to do that, need to know what the messages mean. They are also generally designed to be de-coupled from each other so…
Design Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (DFMEA) is a software engineering technique that can help validate design decisions or improve upon them. It takes your existing design and puts each component and link under a magnifying glass, running it through a what-if scenario. In this post, I will walk through a DFMEA of a fictional website and on-line store for a fictional florist. If you read my…
“we will need to make sure legal requirements are at least similar across the board” Legal requirements are something engineers don’t like to think too much about: they get in the way of progress and are generally perceived as a pain in the nether regions. There are some disparaging ideas about what lawyers do on a daily basis that seem to be prevalent in the industry. From my point of view,…