18-Aug-2025 Content of Interest

Software

Email is Easy (Jack Bearheart) Well, not really. Take the quiz.
The System Inside the System (Scott Werner) Ruby meets AI: "What's the Rails moment for AI agents?"
50 things I know (Cate Hall) Good read. Like #18: "Ideas are cheap and easy to find; execution is everything."
The 5 Most Common REST API Design Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them) (Milan Jovanović) "know your tradeoffs and own them"
Why Writing Matters (to the Technical Professional) (Ted Neward)

Brain-Computer Interfaces In Healthcare: Current Promise And Future Potentials (Pranavsingh Dhunnoo)
Software to Bolster the Security of Medical Devices (Bob Kronemyer) "Medical device security lags behind modern threats, with 80% of software built on vulnerable open-source code."

All the cool kids are doing it (Jamie Brandon) "LLMs would be the only tool I use that would get more expensive the more I rely on them."
How GLP-1s Are Breaking Life Insurance (Ashwin Sharma) "Right now, insurers are getting fooled by mirages of good health that disappear when people quit treatment."

Entering Technical Debt's ZIRP Era (Scott Werner) "When refactoring is free, when AI can untangle any mess, when the cost of change approaches zero..."
Do not Interrupt Developers, Study Says (Antonija Bilic Arar) "interruptions are usually silent productivity killers"
Live coding sucks (Mustapha Hadid) "It’s all about stress."
Stop Hunting 10x Engineers: Build a 10x Organization Instead (Anastasija Uspenski) "The hero engineer is an illusion"

I Reviewed 500 Pull Requests — Here’s What Every Java Dev Gets Wrong (Kavya’s Programming Path)
What is First Principles Thinking? (Shane Parrish) "First principles thinking is the art of breaking down complex problems into their most fundamental truths."
Workflow Engine design proposal, tell me your thoughts (Oskar Dudycz) Durable execution has "cognitive overhead" no matter who develops it.
Tokens: The New Oil (Kent Beck) "Tomorrow's crisis is tomorrow's problem. Today, you survive."
Getting decent error reports in Bash when you’re using ’set -e’ (Chris Siebenmann) Nice!
Zombie Burnout: A New Way to Think About the Restless Exhaustion of Modern Life (Brad Stulberg) "the one who burns out doesn’t find the work meaningful, whereas the one who thrives does"

Who is LLM (Martin Fowler) "Sometimes you get a fantastic result, often you get dreck,..."
F*ck Yeah, There’s Still a Human in the Loop (Maho Pacheco) "AI will augment their [humams] capabilities, not replace them."

Muse Headband Offers Affordable Brain Activity Tracking (Greg Uyeno) "its measurements of both brain activity and blood oxygenation could be useful for assessing disorders such as sleep apnea."
There’s Neuralink—and There’s the Mind-Reading Company That Might Surpass It (Emily Mullin) The Synchron vs. Neuralink approach.

What The FDA’s Guidance On AI-Enabled Devices Gets Right And Wrong - Forbes (Christian Espinosa)
The Evolution of SBOMs in Medical Device Security (Claire Wallace) "SBOMs have since become a cornerstone for compliance, security, and supply chain transparency"

Building competency is better than therapy (David Heinemeier Hansson) "Open source nails this trifecta of motivations to a T."

No Plan B (Mike Fisher) "Embrace this mindset and build in the flexibility to roll back and adapt"
The AWS Survival Guide for 2025: A Field Manual for the Brave and the Bankrupt (Corey Quinn) "navigating the real AWS experience"
you are in a box (Jynn Nelson) "your data is trapped inside the box that is your program"
Almost Fired (John Calhoun) Good read. "The First Time I Was Almost Fired From Apple"
📄 Full-breadth Developers (Justin Searls) "Get serious about learning and using these new tools."

FDA’s draft guidance on AI/ML has startups on high alert - AI News (Eric Elsen) The FDA AI guidance needs close attention from AI-driven diagnostics and early-stage medtech startups.