Articles I enjoyed reading
Articles I saved and kept. Some taught me the job, some changed how I argue about it, and some I still think about years later. A decade of reading, filtered down to the ones worth passing on.
Craft
Writing code, shaping it, and reviewing it.
- Common Mistakes in Modularisation two-wrongs.com
- Why I don’t buy "duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction" codewithjason.com
- Your Code Doesn’t Have to Be a Mess danielsieger.com
- Simplicity is An Advantage but Sadly Complexity Sells Better eugeneyan.com
- Code is run more than read olano.dev
- The Code Review Pyramid morling.dev
- In Praise of Stacked PRs benjamincongdon.me
- A note about Git commit messages github.com
- Lehman’s Laws of Software Evolution bartwullems.blogspot.com
- The 13 software engineering laws newsletter.manager.dev
- My guiding principles after 20 years of programming alexewerlof.medium.com
- Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out lepiter.io
- Everything that uses configuration files should report where they’re located utcc.utoronto.ca
- Python type hints: *args and **kwargs adamj.eu
- The Unix philosophy en.wikipedia.org
- The Twelve-Factor App 12factor.net
- Software Engineering at Google abseil.io
Career
Seniority, money, and the shape of a working life.
- Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice kalzumeus.com
- Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued kalzumeus.com
- The Open Guide to Equity Compensation github.com
- What Actually Makes You Senior terriblesoftware.org
- A Senior Engineer’s Checklist littleblah.comarchived
- What makes a Senior Engineer? Writing Software vs Building Systems codewithstyle.info
- We don’t have Seniors anymore sibelius.substack.com
- 17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager charity.wtf
- Maybe you should do less “work” johnwhiles.com
- What makes developers productive? jeremymikkola.com
- How to Grow Professional Relationships tej.as
- How Taking A ‘Big Five’ Personality Test Can Help Or Harm Your Career forbes.com
- Why you need a "WTF Notebook" simplermachines.com
- If you succeed, you will fail boyter.org
- Reflecting on 18 years at Google ln.hixie.ch
- What I learned getting acquired by Google shreyans.org
Teams
Hiring, planning, and the ways companies go wrong.
- How to Freaking Find Great Developers By Having Them Read Code freakingrectangle.wordpress.com
- Why not hire part-time developers? aklos.substack.com
- How to communicate why your startup is worth joining wasp-lang.dev
- How a startup loses its spark blog.johnqian.com
- I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea blog.tjcx.me
- Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it blog.railway.com
- Encouraging Development Best Practices with Gamification medium.com
- Developers Like Winning: Gamifying Code Reviews slideshare.net
- How to waste time and overcomplicate things ryanwarnock.me
- If Architects had to work like Programmers gksoft.comarchived
- I’m OK; The Bull Is Dead computerworld.com
- Logo, Bullshit & Co., Inc. ia.net
Systems
Deep dives into how the machinery actually works.
- Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3 allthingsdistributed.com
- Everything wrong with databases and why their complexity is now unnecessary blog.redplanetlabs.com
- The problems with (Python’s) Celery docs.hatchet.run
- Launch HN: Hatchet — Open-source task queue news.ycombinator.com
- UUID Benchmark War ardentperf.com
- Rate limiting with Redis engineering.ramp.com
- Retries: an interactive study of common retry methods encore.dev
- The world in which IPv6 was a good design apenwarr.ca
- It’s time to leave the leap second in the past engineering.fb.com
- There’s Math.random(), and then there’s Math.random() v8.dev
- Implicit keyword arguments for Python lwn.net
- Putting the "You" in CPU cpu.land
- Inside the tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets righto.com
- The anatomy of a smart bulb cheriches.com
- Timing With Curl susam.net
- New talk: Learning DNS in 10 years jvns.ca
- 20 years of payment processing problems kaimi.io
- What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase? devblogs.microsoft.com
- RFC 10008: The HTTP QUERY Method datatracker.ietf.org
- 20 lines of code that will beat A/B testing every time stevehanov.ca
- Basically Everyone Should Be Avoiding Docker lukesmith.xyz
- Error messages from Apple’s MPW C compiler news.ycombinator.com
AI
Agents, models, and the moment we are in.
- Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji? vgel.me
- LLMs Are Complicated Now news.ycombinator.com
- Unlimited OCR: One-shot long-horizon parsing news.ycombinator.com
- Tokenomics: Quantifying Where Tokens Are Used in Agentic Software Engineering arxiv.org
- More Agents Is All You Need arxiv.org
- Human Bottlenecks borretti.me
- If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort tombedor.dev
- Welcome to Gas Town steve-yegge.medium.com
- Qwen3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development quesma.com
- Apple’s New Speech API vs Whisper: The First Real Benchmark get-inscribe.com
- Sakana Fugu: Multi-Agent System as a Model sakana.ai
- Introducing eve vercel.com
- Using GPT-3 to explain how code works simonwillison.net
- Ushering in the Thermodynamic Future extropic.ai
- Apple Intelligence is the company’s new generative AI offering techcrunch.com
- Google Bard is now Gemini blog.google
Design
Interfaces, objects, and the people who use them.
- Desperately seeking squircles figma.com
- Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design cs.umd.edu
- The Rise Of User-Hostile Software den.dev
- Google’s Plan To DRM The Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For techdirt.com
- The buttons on Zenith’s original ‘clicker’ TV remote were a mechanical marvel theverge.com
- On the Origin of the iPhone daringfireball.net
- How to teach technical concepts with cartoons jvns.ca
- Draw SVG rope using JavaScript muffinman.io
- Yet another keyboard post, or, introducing ErgoNICE val.packett.cool
Rabbit holes
Money, minds, and things I read for no good reason.
- Harry Browne’s 17 Golden Rules of Financial Safety thetaoofwealth.wordpress.com
- How Ikea tricks you into buying more stuff thehustle.co
- I broke IKEA cohost.orgarchived
- Why Sri Lanka is having an economic crisis noahpinion.substack.com
- WeWork Just Filed for Bankruptcy wired.com
- New Research Identifies the 2 Major Causes of Loneliness psychologytoday.com
- The Gottman Four Horsemen gottman.com
- The Doorway Effect en.wikipedia.org
- What if you did the exact opposite? (like the rogue bees do) mrdbourke.com
- 100 Positive News from 2023 gapminder.org
- Building a 42-inch E Ink Art Frame eliot.blog
- Ups and Downs of A Side Project jereze.com
- I Created the Nerdiest Game Ever plbrault.com
- Decrypting Rita egypt.urnash.com
- A link that sends you to a random Web 1.0 website news.ycombinator.com