There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things -- Phil Karlton (bonus variations on the page)
"Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers — Senko Rašić
The software development profession is in the midst of upheaval. Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is c...
The peril of laziness lost | The Observation Deck
In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris: If we’re going to talk about good software design, we have to talk about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, the basis of good software design. We’ve all fallen into the trap of using cut-and-paste when we should have defined a higher-level abstraction, if only just a loop or subroutine. To be sure, some folks have gone to the opposite extreme of defining ever-growing mounds of higher level abstractions when they should have used cut-and-paste. Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less.
</> htmx ~ Working With AI: A Concrete Example
In this essay, Carson Gross walks through a concrete bug fix in hyperscript to show where AI helped, where it fell short, and why keeping a knowledgeable human in the loop is what kept complexity in check.
Serpentine software
I don’t usually write hot takes. But StrongDM’s Software Factory post is worth it, so here goes. Their post is elegant, short, and well-written, so I’m going to just go through a bunch of pull quotes. Compounding correctness long-horizon agentic coding workflows [now] compound correctness rather than error This is a big, empirical claim. I’m already convinced by my own experiences that agents, suitably scaffolded, can form a Brownian ratchet, such that pouring on more compute helps, on balance.
When did Computer Science Theory Get so Hard?
I posted on When did Math get so hard? a commenter pointed out that one can also ask When did Computer Science Theory Get so Hard? For t...
Systems design 3: LLMs and the semantic revolution
Long ago in the 1990s when I was in high school, my chemistry+physics teacher pulled me aside. "Avery, you know how the Internet works, righ...
Thomas Ricci - Home
I'm a college student and software engineer currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at WPI.
Ten Lines Of Code That Changed My World – Pixelambacht
Front-end antics and typographic mischievousness
A programmer's loss of identity - ratfactor
This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me. In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be. Everything I wrote there is still true, but amplified.
Software Acceleration and Desynchronization
A look at the ever-present drive to make software delivery faster and how it might break down various activity loops in organizations.
Modular: The Claude C Compiler: What It Reveals About the Future of Software
Compilers occupy a special place in computer science. They're a canonical course in computer science education. Building one is a rite of passage. It forces you to confront how software actually works, by examining languages, abstractions, hardware, and the boundary between human intent and machine execution.
Overview
What is Blacksky? Blacksky Algorithms is building the future of self-governable online communities with tools that make complex infrastructure simple to deploy. Most social platforms control what users see, how communities operate, and who gets to feel safe online. Blacksky changes that by providing one-click infrastructure for independent, self-governed digital spaces. Our platform lets communities […]
Prioritize learning / seth.computer
The personal website of Seth Etter, a Wichita, KS based software engineer.
Notes on software quality
“The absence of problems” is the best definition I can come up with for quality.
