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In defense of ruthless managers
There are two kinds of engineering manager: empathetic and ruthless. I think ruthless managers are underrated for a few reasons. Empathetic…
How to work in tech when your job isn't safe
In the glory days of the 2010s, tech companies were very invested in their employees’ work-life balance. Those glory days are over…
The future of AI is Ruby on Rails
Large language models are very good at generating and editing code. Right now, it’s probably the “killer app” of AI: the companies actually…
Engineers should state the obvious
One surprising thing I’ve learned from writing this blog is that I should worry a lot less about saying things that seem obvious. A lot of…
The good times in tech are over
For most of the last decade, being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs and firings were…
Refactoring to understand and "vibe coding"
In the last months, the practice of getting a LLM to build your entire program for you (via Cursor, or Copilot, or just asking ChatGPT) has…
What's next after the AI bubble bursts?
In the mid-1800s, America went mad for rail. Over thirty thousand miles of rail were built in a five year period. This was all largely…
Model Context Protocol explained as simply as possible
Three months ago, Anthropic released “the Model Context Protocol”, or MCP. In the last few weeks, interest in it seems to have really picked…
Great software design looks underwhelming
Years ago I spent a lot of time reviewing coding challenges. The challenge itself was very straightforward - building a CLI tool that hit an…
Value over replacement in software engineering
There are two ways of assessing how much value you’re providing as an engineer. The first way is to total up all of the code you’ve shipped…
Knowing where your engineer salary comes from
With the recent flurry of US federal firings, many people are pointing and laughing at the Trump-voting federal employees who are just now…
Building your sense of what's important at a tech company
One of the most important career skills in tech is learning to recognize what work actually matters. Many engineers go through their careers…
Paths through the space of all possible solutions
Some things you can’t do because they’re impossible. For instance, if you’re designing a distributed system, you can’t violate the CAP…
How I know I'm working with a strong engineer
There are many ways to judge engineers (lines of code written, how smart they sound, choice of IDE, what projects they’ve worked on). I…
Advice for prompting reasoning models
I’ve written about how prompting regular LLMs is not as important as people think. Reasoning models are different. When you’re using…
Weak engineering managers
In a previous post I made the point that having a weak manager - a manager without political clout - is really bad news if you’re an…
Using LLMs effectively isn't about prompting
When people talk about using language models effectively, they mainly talk about prompting: sharing great prompts, lists of tips for…
To avoid being replaced by LLMs, do what they can't
It’s a strange time to be a software engineer. Large language models are very good at writing code and rapidly getting better. Multiple…
Thinking like a LLM
Large language models have gotten much better at thinking in the past few years. Billions of dollars have been spent to study how they think…
Engineers who won’t commit
Some engineers think it’s a virtue to remain non-committal in technical discussions. Should our team build a new feature in an event-driven…