An alternate path for Staff+ engineers that optimizes for systems over spotlights and stewardship over fungibility.
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.
Harness engineering: leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
By Ryan Lopopolo, Member of the Technical Staff
Dario Amodei — The Adolescence of Technology
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI
Relocating Rigor - The Phoenix Architecture
The Discipline That Looks Like Recklessness
psf (@psf@oldbytes.space)
In their article ["Malleable Software"](https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software), Ink & Switch list various ways that modern software applications fail to serve the user: - Software is too rigid: users can’t tailor it to suit their workflow, except by entering the role of programmers. - Software applications are overspecialized "avocado slicers", not general tools like "knives", so their lack of tailorability is keenly felt. - Software doesn’t provide a reasonable learning curve from beginner to expert; in other words, time spent learning an application doesn’t unlock tailorability, instead the end user must learn an unrelated skill like a markup/scripting language or even the tool’s implementation language. - Software applications are increasingly siloed, so sharing data between apps, let alone orchestrating cross-app workflows, is overly difficult. These are real problems. From what I can tell, Ink & Switch are software researchers, and view the problems from a highly technical perspective, focusing on novel infrastructure that enables end-user programmability. They pose questions such as "how do we ease users into programming?" and "instead of shipping a dead, static binary, can we ship a living image containing programming tools allowing it to be modified in arbitrary ways while still running?" These ideas are technologically exquisite, but they fail to provide a gentle learning curve. (cont'd) 🧵
obra/superpowers
An agentic skills framework & software development methodology that works.
Oligarchen-Linux: Der rasante und problematische Aufstieg von Omarchy
Techkonzerne und CEOs spenden enorme Summen an die nischenorientierte Linux-Distribution Omarchy. Deren extrem rechten Gründer verschafft das viel Einfluss.
Roomy joins Modal incubator - Roomy
Rigorous institutional structures make for credible purpose-orientation.
Starlight 🌟 Build documentation sites with Astro
Starlight helps you build beautiful, high-performance documentation websites with Astro.
I've gone full Nix: Proxmox to NixOS + Incus | Bas Nijholt
After years of running a Proxmox cluster, I migrated my entire homelab to NixOS with Incus. I explain the philosophical friction of imperative 'appliance' OSs vs declarative hosts, share how I migrated my LXC/VM workloads, and why it is the perfect infrastructure to manage using AI agents.
WINKEL BASE W227B minimalist design | powerful impact
Aesthetic and functional designer lamps by Wastberg+ for every room – in timeless Scandinavian design. Find the perfect lamp for your needs now.
DeepMind Institute
Bold, well-evidenced thinking on AGI from the lab that pioneered the field. Read the latest essays from the DeepMind Institute.
A practical guide to frontend System Design
Sam, a passionate frontend developer, had been in the job market for what felt like...
LaSuite - L'espace de travail ouvert et souverain des agents de l'État
Une suite cohérente d'outils open source, sécurisés et simples d'utilisation, conçus pour aider les agents publics à créer, organiser, décider et collaborer en toute confiance.
bliki: Two Hard Things
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things -- Phil Karlton (bonus variations on the page)
