23-Jan-2025 Content of Interest

Software

Taking a Look at Compression Algorithms (Moncef Abboud) "It’s about stripping data of redundancies, reducing entropy, and extracting information."
How to Make Your Team’s Work More Visible (Rebecca Knight) Good advice.
I’m glad I took the off-ramp from software engineering (Forrest Brazeal) "It has always been about how well you can solve human problems."
Software bill-of-materials docs eyed for Python packages (Paul Krill)
The Essence of Successful Abstractions (Chris Krycho)
Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant? (Gergely Orosz) "The drop in questions indicates that trouble is ahead.""
UIs Should Be Versioned, Just Like We Version APIs (Phill Mendonça-Vieira) "There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t show the same care and attention to how changes impact our UIs as we do to our APIs."
Notes on Nix (Forrest Brazeal) "I want them to deploy EXACTLY THE SAME WAY every time on every machine"
TIOBE Index for January 2025 Hard to believe that in 2025 VB and Fortran are in the top 10 and COBOL is #20!

The Startup’s Journey to Acquisition: Lessons from FeatherPay - DevPro Journal "streamline payment and billing processes and enhance the overall experience for healthcare providers and patients"

Build Times: The Most Important Developer Productivity Metric (Liz Fong-Jones) The TL;DR of short build times!
Customer Misbehavior (Mike Fisher) "you really can’t control how people will use or perceive your creation."
Open source licenses: Everything you need to know (Paul Sawers) Good refresher.
Accurate Benchmarking (Ateş Göral) The article, meh, but love the cursor effect.
What Spotify Is Really Costing Us (Hua Hsu) Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome?
Are You Checked Out at Work? (Rebecca Horan, Melissa Karz, HBR)

TBM 332: The Last Strategy Framework You’ll Ever Need (John Cutler) "Strategy ... it's about negotiating a narrative, identity, and power within the organization."
Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases (Sean Goedecke) Job security!
Why is modeling so powerful? (Eric Normand) "Models allow us to use lots of the parts of our brains to work on a problem while working around our limitations."
Refactoring with Codemods to Automate API Changes (Martin Fowler) "By using Abstract Syntax Trees (AST), codemods allow you to automate large-scale code changes with precision and minimal effort."
Stay Gold, America (Jeff Atwood)
2025 Tech Predictions (Ted Neward) 2024 results and 2025 predictions.
2024 in Review: Reading and Writing Highlights (Richard Seroter) Richard apparently never sleeps!

Delusional dreams of excess freedom (David Heinemeier Hansson) "That being needed, being useful is far more attractive than leaning back in leisure."

Happy New Years! 🎉

Rules for Writing Software Tutorials (Michael Lynch) Comprehensive list.
Unintended Consequences (Mike Fisher) "The perils of poorly designed metrics and incentives"
Systems Ideas that Sound Good But Almost Never Work—“Let’s just…” (Steven Sinofsky) A lot of premature optimization.
Advent of Code 2024 (Mike Zamansky)
150 papers for Software Engineers (Facundo Olano) Good reference.
Distributed Locking: A Practical Guide (Oskar Dudycz)
2024 Tech Roundup: The News You Might Have Missed (Tomas Fernandez) Lots of end-of-year lists around, but this one is pretty good.
On Long Term Software Development (Bert Hubert) Some critical applications "appreciate your software sticking around for decades, with well described and pre-announced changes"
Reflecting on static types (Jacob Emcken) "static types provide a sense of security...can lead to complacency, causing developers to overlook more effective solutions."
Why The Ends Don’t Justify The Means - Friday Forward (#463) (Robert Glazer) "Leaders must constantly examine the balance between ends and means"
Optimize your shell experience (Matheus Richard) Handy tips. I also use: Atuin - Magical Shell History

The premise trap (David Heinemeier Hansson) "a one-step-forwards-two-steps-backwards dance"