23-Jul-2026 Content of Interest

Med Dev

Does code quality still matter? (Mark Seemann) "Code quality matters to human programmers because of cognitive constraints."
Why care about programming languages (Eduardo Bellani) "In the AI age, understanding these concepts becomes more important, not less"
The Vital Few (Mike Fisher) "In any scientific field, Price argued, half the published papers would come from the square root of the total number of authors."
Are PMs becoming irrelevant? (David Pereira) "PMs who insist on writing better user stories, polishing PRDs, or curating the backlog will become irrelevant."
The Power Of “Why?” (Jason Gorman) "Remember that in a decision tree, each decision constrains possible future decisions."
The Prototype Is a Question, Not a Product (Juan Cruz Martinez) "Before anyone prompts an agent, define what the prototype may prove"

You Just Hired a Million Bad Employees (George Sivulka) "For the first time in history, humans are cheaper than software."
A Small Problem (Mike Fisher) "And the broadcast is a separate job from solving the problem." "
In defense of not understanding your codebase (Sean Goedecke) "In fact, in large systems a partial understanding is the best you can do."
Good Tools Are Invisible (Ginger Bill) "You cannot have an honest conversation about a tool with someone who’s decided the tool is part of their personality."
The Future Worth Building Is Human (Thinking Machines Lab) "To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine."
Multi-Tenancy Isn’t About Databases (Derek Comartin) Good trade-offs overview. "Multi-Tenancy Is About Boundaries"
Obfuscated, self-evaluating bash script by CDN Akamai being supplied to consumers via retail stores (Tris Sherliker) Fun!

When Nothing Happens (Mike Fisher) “Whether one is viewed as an abusive leader or a master motivator is in the eye of the beholder.”
Ordinary Engineers, Not Heroic Inventors (Tim O’Reilly) "This is how the future can belong not just to the inventors of AI but to the people who make it usable, adaptable, interoperable, and worth adopting."
This Is How To Overcome Burnout: 5 Secrets From Philosophy (Eric Barker) "We’ve internalized the values of the achievement society."
TBM 429: How To Thrive At Work When You Think Too Much (John Cutler) TL;DR, but I love the pirate ship analogy.
Why I Stopped Arguing With People (Cong Wang) "So put it away. Stay humble. Keep asking."
Code review is theater now (John Bristowe) "AI sped up the belt, and the chocolates aren’t going to wrap themselves."
In defense of AI mandates (Charity Majors) "The mandate is one way of putting organizational muscle behind a decision." May have validity, but still feels cringy.

Stop eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos (Adam Mastroianni) Good read. "This Great Switcheroo happened, I think, because as it got harder to become rich, it got easier to become famous."

A return to two-pizza culture (Dr. Werner Vogels) "You had the autonomy to make decisions with as little bureaucracy as possible."
Why Good Architecture Still Fails in Production (Ivan Pelivanovic) "Production is where the assumptions become visible"
Worse is better (Mark Seemann) "perfection is the enemy of the good"
The Two-Organizations Problem (Irina Wolpert, HBR) "the polished version executives see in dashboards and boardrooms, and the messier, more revealing reality lived by employees"
The Mom-and-Pop SaaS era has arrived (Elena Verna) "80% of builders come from non-technical backgrounds."
Make AI Boring Again (xpost) (mipsytipsy) "On the ethics of engagement, the problem with purity politics, and a world worth fighting for"

The Network You Can’t See (Mike Fisher) "The biggest risk for most leaders is not bad ideas. It is having built a feedback loop so tight that bad ideas come back validated."
The Universe just wants to learn (Shyam Sreevalsan) "Are DNA and the weights of a neural network a similar kind of object?"
The New Software Lifecycle (Addy Osmani) Informative graphics.
Lost confidence (Jason Cohen) "use techniques that work whenever the future is unpredictable. Because it always is."
The Architecture of Focus (Magnus Hedemark) "Do not fight your environment. Redesign it."
Cartels of Mediocrity (Taylor Wood) TL;DR, but a good takeaway: "take pride in doing high-quality work even if peers do not!"

Andros Fenollosa: How I built a GPU backend for Emacs (Andros Fenollosa) Interesting development effort and emacs-devel discussion.