Software Folklore ― Andreas Zwinkau

Little Big Updates: dispatches from Quality Week

This is a wonderful piece of writing by Marcin, ostensibly about bug-fixing but really an almost existential examination of the nature of coding.

Bugs are, by definition, a look backward—at past behavior, at code that already exists, at the old work of engineers whom you’ve never met. It can feel more fun to write new code, chart new territories, add new functionality.

But the past can be fun, too. A good bug is a puzzle. A mystery. A whodunit. To solve a bug, sometimes you have to be a scientist: observe and measure, chart out the logic, follow the math. But then, two minutes later, you need to wear a hat of a very particular detective—take your flip notepad and interview different pieces of code to understand not what they claim they do, but what they actually do.

New Programming Jargon — Global Nerdy

Some of the best neologisms in programming, many of them to do with bug-fixing.

Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You - Stack Overflow

People act like writing code is the hard part of software. It is not. It never has been, it never will be. Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering, and it’s getting easier by the day. The hard parts are what you do with that code—operating it, understanding it, extending it, and governing it over its entire lifecycle.

The present wave of generative AI tools has done a lot to help us generate lots of code, very fast. The easy parts are becoming even easier, at a truly remarkable pace. But it has not done a thing to aid in the work of managing, understanding, or operating that code. If anything, it has only made the hard jobs harder.

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

A very thought-provoking presentation from Maggie on how software development might be democratised.

Making Reasonable Use of Computer Resources

The paradox of performance:

This era of incredibly fast hardware is also the era of programs that take tens of seconds to start from an SSD or NVMe disk; of bloated web applications that take many seconds to show a simple list, even on a broadband connection; of programs that process data at a thousandth of the speed we should expect. Software is laggy and sluggish — and the situation shows little signs of improvement. Why is that?

Because we prioritise the developer experience over the user experience, that’s why:

Although our job is ostensibly to create programs that let users do stuff with their computers, we place a greater emphasis on the development process and dev-oriented concerns than on the final user product.

We would do well to heed Craig’s observations on Fast Software, the Best Software.