- It’s been a few weeks since my last weeknotes. I had a restful holiday in Wales and a lot of work things to catch up on.
- I’ve been thinking a lot about Sean Godecke’s essays on the role of a programmer in the current economy, and the need to provide demonstrable value – particularly for seniors and managers. This is shaping my approach to my work.
- I wrote a post about how The Joel Test turned 25 this month, looking at its historical importance and pondering what a modern Joel test might include.
- In another flight of nostalgia I looked up Brad Fitzpatrick and Lisa Philip’s notes on scaling Livejournal, which were a useful reference for scaling Flirtomatic many years ago.
- I continued my experiments with Amazon Q and learned a lot. I should have those written up by the end of the month.
Links
- The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey has been published, although it may be a few weeks before I get around to reading this properly.
- Another great piece from Charity Majors was In Praise of ‘Normal‘ Engineers, where she talks about the importance of teams rather than individual developers, and how systems must be easy to use: “The best engineering orgs are the ones where normal engineers can do great work”
- Sean Goedecke’s What’s Going to Happen to Junior Engineers was a good exploration of the potential long-term meaning of the fall in junior tech positions.
- The conclusions of Anthropic’s Project Vend feel quite speculative, but it raises some interesting questions: “we think this experiment suggests that AI middle-managers are plausibly on the horizon… the AI won’t have to be perfect to be adopted; it will just have to be competitive with human performance at a lower cost in some cases… we don’t know if AI middle managers would actually replace many existing jobs or instead spawn a new category of businesses”.
- Welcoming the Next Generation of Programmers argues that vibe coders are programmers and it’s important to onboard and welcome them to the existing developer communities.
- Christina Wodtke posted on linkedin about how a lot of Gen-X programmers have the same passion for GenAI as for the early web – in a way that didn’t happen with blockchain or VR (via Simon Willison)
Books
Tidy First by Kent Beck
I read Kent Beck’s Tidy First? while away – some thought-provoking ideas, but they rely on being able to produce and merge changes easily. Again, I need to find time to write up my notes.