Unoptimized To optimize or not to optimize? That is the question. I tried optimizing the optimal amount and ended up not optimized. [0] So what...
Buy wisely
Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use. Sometimes I consider other priorities such as cost per smile, cost per thrill, cost per externality, ...
Doing nothing at work
Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace. I like to aim to be running at 80% utilization by default: unless I have a high-pressure project going on, I spend 20% of my workday away from the computer.
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.
Value(s): building a better world for all
A bold, urgent argument on the misplacement of value in…
My Modified Couch to 5K Running Program
I found the official program too aggressive, so I modified it to give a more gradual increase in duration.
No Coding Before 10am | Michael Bloch
Engineering is no longer about writing code. Here is one startup's playbook for building in the AI agent era.
In defense of not reading the code | Ben Shoemaker
Last week, I wrote an article whose purpose was to discuss where I saw AI-assisted coding going. That's not what generated 200 comments worth of passionate...
What AI coding costs you | Tom Wojcik
What's the effect of the prolonged AI usage among coders and is it tracked correctly, if it all?
Harness Engineering for Self-Improvement
The concept of recursive self-improvement (RSI) dates back to I. J. Good (1965), where he defined an “ultraintelligent machine” as a system that can surpass humans in all intellectual activities and design better machines to improve itself. Yudkowsky (2008) used the phrase “recursive self-improvement” for a specific feedback loop: an AI uses its current intelligence to improve the cognitive machinery that produces its intelligence. This feedback loop in modern AI may indicate the model rewriting its own weights directly, or more broadly the model improves the training pipeline and the deployment system, which in turn enables a better successor model with improved performance across economically valuable tasks. The speed of research development in AI has been shown to drastically accelerated in frontier labs (Anthropic; OpenAI).
The virtuous circle
The virtuous circle is the most powerful pattern in developer tooling. And it's the myth of the 10x developer that makes it hard to see.
Notes on software quality
“The absence of problems” is the best definition I can come up with for quality.
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.
Squoosh
Squoosh is the ultimate image optimizer that allows you to compress and compare images with different codecs in your browser.
Mario meets Pareto
Discover how to find the best Mario Kart 8 build using the Pareto frontier method. This interactive guide explores multi-objective optimization of speed, acceleration, and other key stats to help you beat your friends on the race track.
TinyPNG – Compress AVIF, WebP, PNG and JPEG images
Free online image optimizer for faster websites! Reduce the file size of your AVIF, WEBP, JPEG and PNG images while preserving the image quality.
IA : après l’inflation engendrée par la crise énergétique, celle provoquée par l’intelligence artificielle, « l’IAflation »
Contraints d’augmenter leurs prix fortement, Microsoft et Apple dévissent en Bourse. L’intelligence artificielle, qui devait entraîner des gains de productivité, se traduit pour l’instant par des hausses de prix.
