Today
- Job postings for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) have surged, but many professionals don’t want the role because it’s more like solutions engineering than software development....
- According to the FT, demand for software engineers is rising again, and in relative terms is outperforming the wider jobs market. That’s the headline most people will take away. But the more important detail is that the growth is concentrated in more experienced roles, while...
- The shift from conductor to orchestrator: how to coordinate teams of AI coding agents in real-world software workflows. From subagents to Agent Teams to purpose-built orchestration tools, this talk covers the patterns, tools, and discipline required to thrive in the era of...
- A few days ago I wrote and published a blog post about how Swift interacts with C projects, using Raylib. Somehow, much to my delight, it has been posted on multiple social networks, like Reddit and Hackernews. Yesterday, again, I was bored. So I tried....
Yesterday
- Blog About Moonbound Shop This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me. March 26, 2026 This is a genuinely interesting document: the Claude chat transcript, very well-presented, from a software developer’s...
- What about juniors? Start at the beginning. Last week I wrote about how the role of the most senior tech ICs has changed. Today, I wanted to share some thoughts on a more difficult topic: how the role of junior software engineers, folks just starting out on their career, has...
- Anthropic carried a study, done by getting its model to interview some 80,000 users to understand their opinions about AI, what they hope from it, and what they fear. Two things stood out to me. It’s easy to assume there are AI optimists and AI pessimists, divided into separate...
- This is the second chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon. Thank you! This chapter provides an overview of the most basic usage of the SQLAlchemy library to...
- Classic RAG expects a linear process 1 An LLM translates the user’s prompt into a query 2 We search on......
- It’s a popular joke among software engineers that writing overcomplicated, unmaintainable code is a pathway to job security. After all, if you’re the only person who can work on a system, they can’t fire you. There’s a related take that “nobody gets promoted for simplicity”: in...
- A JavaScript engine (e.g. V8, JavaScriptCore) executes JavaScript code. It doesn't know about things like files, HTTP requests, or timers.On the other hand, a JavaScript runtime (e.g. Node.js, Bun) is a more complete environment where JavaScript runs. It contains a JavaScript...
This week
- Parkinson’s Law is mainly interpreted as “people fill the time available”. That line was really only a hook. The original paper is really about how organisations create extra work and headcount for themselves, regardless of whether there is more genuinely useful work to do. As...
- Big Citywide update today! I’ve added lowercase to the family, plus over 170 new characters, expanded diacritics and symbols, and a fresh round of refinements to existing letterforms, spacing, and stylistic sets. And because I’m doing things DIY Future Fonts style, this is a...
- March 25, 2026 Somewhere, some content specialist has the rather tough job of writing a monthly newsletter about alumin(i)um, and, honestly … they are doing a great job! I read the newsletter This is a sincere rec for Norsk Hydro’s newsletter—it’s fun, and more...
- Creating a subset of Go that translates to C was never my end goal. I liked writing C code with Go, but without the standard library it felt pretty limited. So, the next logical step was to port Go's stdlib to C.Of course, this isn't something I could do all at once. So I...
- Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along: Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. (You wouldn't believe how many drafts I've written of this essay.) There’s an incredible amount of learning and...
- Most useful agents need several tools at once. A DevOps agent that spots a CVE also needs to file a ticket for it. Until recently, you had orchestrate those handoffs yourself or only use custom tools without built-in tools. Tool combination in the Gemini API now lets you combine...
- An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a short document that captures and explains a single decision relevant to a product or ecosystem. Documents should be short, just a couple of pages, and contain the decision, the context for making it, and significant ramifications. They...
- Over the weekend, I had some interesting discussions about the impacts AI on developer growth and skill atrophy. Much of that discussion was inspired by Mo Bitar's video on the subject. Within my small group, we couldn't come to a consensus on its impacts. We all...
- I found myself using the phrase “the Creative Infinite” when I’m talking about AI as a design material. I keep coming back to it because I don’t think we’ve fully grasped what this technology actually is, what it can do, […]...
- I used AI to contribute to an open source project. The code was merged. I didn’t learn anything and I felt bad as an engineer....
- There is a lil’ UI detail on this blog. Most people don’t even notice it, but the ones who do often reach out, asking how on earth it works. It feels like it defies the rules of CSS! In this blog post, I’ll break down the surprisingly-straightforward implementation so you can...
- At this point in history, AI sociopaths have purchased all the world's RAM in order to run their copyright infringement factories at full blast. Thus the amount of memory in consumer computers and phones seems to be going down. After decades of not having to care about memory...
- Two weeks ago I wrote an article about governance and documentation on an organisational scale. This is the follow-up post that focuses on the project scale. You could just read this post, but it’s probably better that you start with the previous one first The biggest problem...
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