Shape Up will help you break free of “best practices” that aren’t really working, think deeper about the right problems, and start shipping meaningful projects your team can celebrate.
Paging Charity? How do I get my leaders to stop running teams Into the ground? - Stack Overflow
I'm a senior staff engineer, and I’m wondering what advice you might have for a person in my role in a large company to affect priorities and the speed at which work is "expected" to be executed.
The Paradox of Perfection: When ‘Good Enough’ is Actually Better
Exploring the tension between engineering perfectionism and pragmatic delivery. Discover why striving for the perfect solution often prevents us from shipping valuable improvements and how to find the balance.
Harnessing Frustration: Using LLMs to Overcome Activation Energy
One of my biggest weaknesses as a software engineer is procrastination when facing a new project. When the scope is unclear, I have a tendency to wait until I feel I’ve “felt out” the problem to start doing anything. I know I’ll feel better and work much faster when I get “stuck in” but I still struggle with that first step, overcoming the “activation energy” required to engage with the details. LLMs have been a game-changer for me in this respect: I can just throw a couple of sentences at them with the shape of the problem. This leads to one of two outcomes: The LLM comes up with a good solution, usually in a slightly different way than what I was thinking. I realize “oh wow the solution is much simpler than I thought”. Straight away I start thinking about the consequences of implementing and improving what the LLM suggested. The LLM comes up with a solution that I intuitively recognize as “wrong”. My immediate reaction is frustration (“How could it get it so wrong”) which leads me to go back and forth with the model, explaining to it why its solution could not possibly work. But in the process of arguing with the model, my brain is churning away and generating variations or different approaches that could work. After a while, even if the AI is still on the wrong track, the debate will trigger a moment of inspiration where suddenly the solution will come to me. I’ll excitedly start up a new conversation and start working through it with the model. The key is the emotional reaction I have immediately to the LLM’s response, either excitement or frustration. By harnessing this immediate feedback loop, I get my brain out of its passive, procrastination mode. It’s almost like a jolt: either I’m thrilled because it’s simpler than I thought, or I’m spurred to action by the urge to correct a perceived ‘wrong’ answer. This forces me to engage with the problem in a meaningful way.
Vibe Graveyard
Real tech failures and postmortems from the world of rushed shipping and bad decisions.
Bungie overhauls Marathon from original extraction shooter vision
Bungie says addressing player feedback requires the team to 'change both what we're building and how we deliver it,' as it prepares to focus on PVE more.
Software engineering under the spotlight
Think of a tech company as a giant, dimly-lit factory. Work goes on throughout the factory as components shuffle back and forth, and finished products get steadily carted away, but the coordination and efficiency of each section is fairly low. Some parts of the factory get jammed up and don’t do anything for days. Other parts are manically producing broken components which are thrown away unused. However, the factory manager - i.e. the tech company CEO - has one tool to combat this problem. That tool is the spotlight.
108 PRs in eight days: Accidentally discovering loop engineering | Brittany Ellich | Offprint
How I shipped 108 PRs in eight days with an agent working my task board: the loop engineering setup, constraints, and lessons that made it work.
Developer Experience Goals for Atproto Spaces - AT Protocol
A new series nailing down the moving parts of building on Spaces
Things to Do to Prepare for Patch 12.1
Here are a couple of things that you can do to prepare for Patch 12.1 next week!
Roomy & Designing for Communities | Fish | Offprint
My personal experiences working with the team at Roomy, and how I feel after the last 5 months helping with the project.
‘Shut up and focus on the mission’: Tech workers are frustrated by their companies’ silence about ICE
“I’ve hit my limit of what I’m willing to tolerate”
Resetting on engineering expectations in the age of AI
I’m accepting new sponsorships for The Modern Leader for 2026. If you’re interested (or you think your company may be interested), you can learn more here.
Improving My Hardware Workflow With CI and Nix
One thing you might notice if you read my blog is that I do a lot of hardware projects. Generally, these include a board, some software, and possibly some extraneous components (like CAD design, such as a case). Software tooling is quite mature, but I find that hardware had traditionally lagged quite a bit behind. For a while, I just lived with this, but over the last few months I've put in a bunch of effort to improve my workflow.
Hot Allostatic Load
Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build insi…
