I'm addicted to being useful

You have to know how to drive the car

There are lots of different ways to be a software engineer. You can grind out code for twelve hours a day to make the world a better place. You can focus on glue work: process-based work that makes everyone around you more successful. You can join the conversation with your product manager and designer colleagues to influence what gets built, not just how it gets built. You can climb the ladder to staff engineer and above, or you can take it easy and focus on your hobbies. But whichever of these you choose, you have to know how tech companies work.

Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?

A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.

I Started Programming When I Was 7. I'm 50 Now, and the Thing I Loved Has Changed | James Randall

I still love developing but the shifts that AI have brought are tectonic and are forcing me to re-evaluate my own relationship to building things

Note on 24th September 2026

The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder. We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking …

Science is open software

TL;DR I claim that modern science is synonymous with open source software. This post explains why, why it matters, and what you can (and should) do next. Why do you care about (open source) software? - Everyone I spend a lot of my time working on software. I have been asked why software matters more times than I can remember. Software is, people say, not science. It’s a time sink, something to rush past in the pursuit of what really matters: results (and papers if you’re in academia).

Tinkering with games is as good as playing them

Computer is my hobby

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about programming, or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. Felleisen et al. give a nod to this trend in their book How to Design Programs, when they say "Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies." The Abtruse Goose comic also had their take.

AI, I tried to love you – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Among my peers who study the cultures and economies surrounding technology, I often find myself more tech-positive than most. On the whole I like computers, like the internet, and like in general the emergent human creativity that these things have enabled and revealed. A source of my appreciation is that I expend a lot of effort on the practice of “slow computing,” which is to say, choosing tools and technical communities that I can feel in right relationship with. I tend to approach new socio-technologies (like gig economies, blockchains, and social media) not from a perspective of why is this so bad? so much as asking how could we do this right?

Breaking My Own Rule (Again): AI and the Job Hunt - Jacky Alciné

I said I wasn't going to lean on generative AI but I also said I was going to leave the tech industry. Here's what I actually used to keep applying and what it did (and didn't) do for me.

Engineers do get promoted for writing simple code

It’s a popular joke among software engineers that writing overcomplicated, unmaintainable code is a pathway to job security. After all, if you’re the only person who can work on a system, they can’t fire you. There’s a related take that “nobody gets promoted for simplicity”: in other words, engineers who deliver overcomplicated crap will be promoted, because their work looks more impressive to non-technical managers.

Stack Overflow Insights - Developer Hiring, Marketing, and User Research

Explore the Stack Overflow Developer Survey — data and insights on how developers work, what tools they use, and what they want from employers.

Don't Get Distracted

I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.

‘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”

The Friction I Don't Want to Lose

I love learning. And while the friction of solving new problems is increasingly traded for speed, the experience gained by overcoming that friction is as important as ever.

The Future of Software Engineering Isn’t What You Think

Over the past two decades, I’ve watched software eat the world, then hardware catch up, then Generative AI reshape both at the same time…

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption - software engineering. In …