Software Engineering

Code is something we used to write. If you’ve ever considered yourself a developer or programmer, you know. Systems is something we design and architect. That hasn’t changed. We just have assistance to do it better and faster now. There’s a lot of talk of how code reviews are more important than ever in a world of slop and vibe-coding. This is true. Simon Willison wrote about this in Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work, and Don’t Break Prod captures the spirit of it as well. ...

One of my alltime favourite jokes in the context of software engineering is: “There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.” I recently discovered it came from a post on X. It’s been 16 years since it first came out, and there’s finally a small update we can make: 16 years later, we’ve finally solved off-by-1 errors with the help of agents. Unfortunately, we replaced them with AI slop. Two hard problems remain. ...

My First Lines of Code At the age of 11 in 2003, I wrote my first line of code. I was a Game Master for a DragonBall Z MMORPG on byond.com. Other than creating a cool-looking pixel art item, I don’t really remember the language or any other details. At the age of 14 in 2007, I had to take a programming course as part of my high school’s Math and Computer Science (MaCS) curriculum. We used a language called Turing, which is likely unknown to many. ...