05-Jun-2025 Content of Interest

Software

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"!

Two publishers and three authors fail to understand what “vibe coding” means (Simon Willison) Vibe coding does not mean “using AI tools to help write code”.
What’s the Future of Middle Management? (Gretchen Gavett, Vasundhara Sawhney, HBR) Another AI victim.
Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI (Addy Osmani) "Use AI it to amplify your abilities, not replace them."
How to Use AI to Reduce Technical Debt (Federico Trotta) "The major difficulty of managing technical debt is that it is created daily with every line of code"
There are 47 Million Developers in the World (Antonija Bilic Arar) Interesting stats.

Senators call for investigation into BCI privacy (Elise Reuter) "protections are less clear when BCI devices are used for a nonmedical purpose, such as playing video games"

What is Architecture? (James Heward) "Architecture can be broadly defined as the practice of making the right choices at the right time and ensuring those choices are implemented correctly and remain fit for purpose."
Business Won’t Let Me and other lies we tell to ourselves (Oskar Dudycz) Making Trade-offs, Not Excuses
Event-Hidden Architectures (Charles Zedlewski) "Burying events doesn’t just simplify engineering, it grants engineers with new powers in the process."
On Bloat (Rob Pike) Bloat is inevitable, but can be costly, even dangerous

Ceribell wins FDA nod for algorithm to detect pediatric seizures (Nick Paul Taylor) "Combining a disposable, flexible headband and pocket-sized, battery-operated recorder, the system captures and wirelessly transmits EEG signals."