My conclusion has been that AI tools are force multipliers. But just think about the skill of the average person. Think about the quality of average, publicly-available code. The average force is close to zero or even negative.…
Every line of code is a bet that it will provide more business value than it will cause maintenance burden and cognitive load on future engineers…
When vibes beat the desire for correctness, welcome to the future with AI…
When you have to store and retrieve data from a database, do you choose to execute SQL statements yourself or do you use an object-relational mapper (ORM) to abstract away those calls completely? My answer to that question has been "SQL, obviously" my entire career; ORMs have historically…
The database is often the only stateful portion of a service. As such, software engineers rely on it for everything that asks "what did I say about this last time?" or "can you hold this for the next time I'm here?" Modern relational databases…
Sometimes the worst times make us reflect in productive ways. This holiday season as I coughed up a lung and sweat through 2 shirts a night, I stared angrily at the ceiling through several nights with thousands of thoughts a minute rolling through my head. Most related to my current…
Efficient and effective shell usage is maybe the greatest productivity multiplier for any developer, and it all starts with an effective prompt. There are tons of resources out there on how to build your own custom prompt, and more than a few tools that promise the best of prettiest layout.…
You're likely pretty familiar with Pareto principle, even if you don't associate it with that name. It's often referred to as the 80-20 rule and describes the phenomenon that about 80% of results come from about 20% of the work. When prioritizing software projects,…