23-Jun-2025 Content of Interest

Software

Be a Duck (Sometimes) (Tom Mango) "Being a duck is about keeping your commitments."
In Praise of “Normal” Engineers (charity.wtf) "The smallest unit of software ownership and delivery is the engineering team."
Rolling the ladder up behind us (Xe Iaso) Interesting read.
What comes after Stack Overflow? (Matt Asay) Cannibal’s dilemma!
Model Once, Represent Everywhere: UDA (Unified Data Architecture) at Netflix (Netflix TechBlog) Next-level domain design management. Interesting concepts.

How To Fall Behind in The Age of AI (Charlie Guo) Good post. "maintain a comfortable position at the trailing edge of progress"
Surviving the Great Commoditizer: Stop Getting ‘Good’ at ChatGPT (Erik Dietrich) TL;DR, but a good read anyway.
AI Angst (Tim Bray) "The rent is too damn high"

Everyone Gets a Database (Stephen O’Grady) "Database consolidation continues apace"
Avoiding Management (Joe Marshall) "The worst part of managing is dealing with people." Yep!
Small Programs and Languages (Dave Gauer) Small languages "only require you to understand a few core ideas and give you limitless power in return."

Short-term vs Long-term (Mike Fisher) How to balance investments
That’s How We’ve Always Done Things Around Here (Alex Cristea) Why software teams stick to old habits — and how to challenge them.
I am disappointed in the AI discourse (Steve Klabnik) "What is breaking my brain a little bit is that all of the discussion online around AI is so incredibly polarized."
Being Bored Could Actually Be Good For Your Brain, Scientists Reveal (Michelle Kennedy, Daniel Hermens) "In small doses, boredom is the necessary counterbalance to the overstimulated world in which we live."

Neuralink raises $650M to help expand patient access (Elise Reuter)
A Neuralink Rival Just Tested a Brain Implant in a Person (Emily Mullin) "looking to restore speech and communication in people with spinal cord injury, stroke, or ALS."

The two types of open source (Filip Hráček) "high-expectation versus low-expectation open source"
Reinvent the Wheel (Matthias Endler) "Reinvent for insight. Reuse for impact."
Vibing at Home (Mike Loukides) Like it or not, this is the future!
Pros and Cons of Going from Individual Contributor Back to Manager (Daniel Doubrovkine – aka dB.) Good read. "The cons of being a manager are obvious. It’s a lot more stressful."
Aim Small, Miss Small (Mike Fisher) "Ultimately, great organizations don't just care about details, they care about the right details."
Enlightenmentware (Roman Kashitsyn) "I praise the software that contributed the most to my enlightenment." Yay Emacs!
Why Are There So Many Databases? (Cai Parry-Jones) An opinionated pocket guide to modern DB architectures

Hold What You’ve Got (Mike Fisher) "At the heart of both flying and business is the ability to navigate uncertainty without being thrown off course by every shift in the winds."
Critical Architecture/Software Theory (Tomas Petricek) TL;DR, but some interesting analogies.
Zero to One: Learning Agentic Patterns (Philipp Schmid) AI is eating the world. So much to learn!
Why We Should Learn Multiple Programming Languages (Oskar Dudycz) "Because ultimately, programming languages are tools, not identities."
The enshittification of tech jobs (Cory Doctorow) "Tech workers’ scarcity-derived power has been vaporized."
Algorithms we develop software by (Grant Slatton) "Write everything twice"!