Computer Information, Tips and Tricks

As we see LLMs churn out scads of code, folks have increasingly turned to Cognitive Debt as a metaphor for capturing how a team can lose understanding of what a system does. Margaret-Anne Storey thinks a good way of thinking about these problems is to consider three layers of system health: Technical debt lives in […]

When a team has worked together long enough, certain practices become invisible. The senior engineer who rejects a pull request does not consult a checklist; she recognizes, almost instantly, that the error handling is incomplete, that the abstraction is premature, that the naming does not follow the team’s conventions. The same instincts shape how she […]

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 camps. But what we actually found […]

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 should not be modified if the decision is changed, but linked […]

David Poll points out the flawed premise of the argument that code review is a bottleneck To be fair, finding defects has always been listed as a goal of code review – Wikipedia will tell you as much. And sure, reviewers do catch bugs. But I think that framing dramatically overstates the bug-catching role and […]

When I work with a colleague on a feature that spans several days, we keep a shared document. Not formal documentation: a working record. What we decided, why, what we rejected, what questions remain open. If either of us is absent for a day, the other picks up where we left off. Neither of us […]

Annie Vella did some research into how 158 professional software engineers used AI, her first question was: Are AI tools shifting where engineers actually spend their time and effort? Because if they are, they’re implicitly shifting what skills we practice and, ultimately, the definition of the role itself. She found that participants saw a shift […]

Tech firm fined $1.1m by California for selling high-school students’ data I agree with Brian Marick’s response No such story should be published without a comparison of the fine to the company’s previous year revenue and profits, or valuation of last funding round. (I could only find a valuation of $11.0M in 2017.) We desperately […]

I have always been uncomfortable with patents. Ideologically, I subscribe to Richard Stallman’s school of thought that ideas should move freely, innovation should compound in the open, and progress should not be fenced off by legal constructs. Over time, this led me to develop a strong discomfort with patents, and I genuinely believed they cause […]