Computer Information, Tips and Tricks

I mostly link to written material here, but I’ve recently listened to two excellent podcasts that I can recommend. Anyone who regularly reads these fragments knows that I’m a big fan of Simon Willison, his (also very fragmentary) posts have earned a regular spot in my RSS reader. But the problem with fragments, however valuable, […]

Teams have always had mechanisms for collective learning. Retrospectives, post-incident reviews, lunch-and-learns. The best of these share a property: they convert individual experience into shared practice. What one person encountered in a debugging session or a production incident becomes something the whole team knows. The knowledge escapes the individual and enters the team’s infrastructure: its […]

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 […]