No hugs, some learning
Tags left in place in a powerplant after it was shut down, decommissioned, and abandoned. For some reason I’m a particularly cautious software engineer. It has its downsides, but one concrete benefit is that when I slip (everyone does), those slips are less likely to cause an incident. Over time I’ve seen slips contribute to many serious incidents, and have come to properly value the role of…
Peter Norvig’s “Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know” are a classic in software engineer training. The original sixteen numbers represent, for programmers, the hard constraints of our hardware. In the early 2000s, if you cared about writing fast code you knew that a disk seek cost about 10 milliseconds. “You don’t have to be an engineer to be a racing driver, but you do have to have…
One of eight buildings in the ongoing OpenAI Stargate Abilene project. (Move across the image to slide from ugly to beautiful.) The computer industry has always had a weak relationship with beauty. Recently parts of the valley have become a bit self-conscious of their ugliness. We need a “new aesthetic” and billionaires will grant their couch coins for good ideas. Combine this self-consciousness…
Pablo Picasso, Le Taureau (The Bull), 1945–1946 [Reversed] Just after Christmas something changed in the attitudes of the senior engineers I follow. LLM coding took another step forward. Skeptics became converts, and converts became bulls. 'bout half the engineers I admired pre-ChatGPT have become massive coding agent bulls in the past couple weeks. DHH flipped a few days ago. The others may join…
I’ve listened to each of these episodes at least four times. I listen to a lot of podcasts—Overcast has me averaging 12 hours a week in 2025. But I very rarely listen to an episode more than twice. If I have, it’s because the information, rapport, and storytelling have been especially good. After almost 10 years of listening to podcasts about software and programming, this is my current top 10. 1…
When I took my first startup job, I wanted a place that would train me as a good programmer. When I took the second one, as employee #7, I wanted a place that would train me on everything. At startups “everything” is engineering, support, sales, marketing, growth, operations, and recruiting 1 . This post, probably the first in a series, is about support 2 . In particular, it’s about the core of…
A foundational result in machine learning is that a single-layer perceptron with N 2 parameters can store at least 2 bits of information per parameter ( Cover, 1965 ; Gardner, 1988 ; Baldi & Venkatesh, 1987 ). More precisely, a perceptron can implement a mapping from 2N, N-dimensional, input vectors to arbitrary N-dimensional binary output vectors, subject only to the extremely weak restriction…
Ad copy: "Wouldn't you prefer a computer that really grows with your business?" If you’re into serverless infrastructure engineering, AWS’s Distinguished Engineer Marc Brooker is one of your wisest teachers. In my years working at modal.com his blog has been a super valuable resource to me. I’ve noticed that he really likes ‘the 5 minute rule’, having brought it up at least five times now . I…
Australia is, quite remarkably, the one country in the world that has a net migration gain in its exchange with the United States. For every butcher, baker, and candlestick maker which leaves our lucky country for life in the States, Australia gets back more than it gave. But not software engineers. Australia loses the best of those in droves. They all go to America, and often stay. I’ve been…