Revisiting “No Silver Bullets” in the age of AI
Is AI the long fantasized silver bullet for peak productivity? Was IDE one? Interesting and historically-rich account of silver bullets (or rather the lack of it) in software engineering.
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4 Behaviors That Make You Look Junior (No Matter Your Title)
Professionalism at work is critical, but my take is nobody is born professional. You gotto experience the 4 behaviors to know how to do better next time. Experience is the biggest teacher.
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EP214: Claude Code vs. OpenClaw: 5 Design Dimensions
Reading about OpenClaw’s architecture is like getting familiar with a system design problem. Also, the section about AI evals is unmissable.
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How will AI change operating systems? Part 1: Ubuntu and Linux
Focusing on supporting specialized hardware to run AI smoothly is a wise choice than clobbering the OS experience with dysfunctional AI parts, haha.
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How Instacart Built a Search for Billions of Products
Unification of relational data and vector storage sounds undeniably compelling for semantic search usecases, but it’s important to look at the tradeoffs before going all-in on such an approach. The article’s ‘The Limits of This Approach’ section explains it quite elegantly.
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The Pulse: ‘Tokenmaxxing’ as a weird new trend
Parts of this article on tokenmaxxing read like plots out of outlandish worlds of Cyberpunk and Mad Max. I mean, didn’t we already learn our lessons from ‘lines of code as a performance metric’?
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The 3 Candidates I Always Rejected as a Bar Raiser at Amazon
I can see a bit of myself in all 3 rejected candidate types. What helped me crack interviews was doing more of them (in ‘production’, of course) and learning from failed ones. It was 10x more effective than any mock interview I ever did.
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The Security Architecture of GitHub Agentic Workflow
Glad to know GH approached agent security from a position of distrust rather than trust. Remember what happened to Sonny and VIKI in iRobot despite the strict enforcement of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. You remember it, right?
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The impact of AI on software engineers in 2026: key trends
Aren’t companies firing employees to manage rising AI costs, among other things?
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How Spotify Ships to 675 Million Users Every Week Without Breaking Things
Nothing earth-shaking, TBH. Spotify’s release process is mature and grounded but resembles how releases are contemporarily done in most large product orgs. At Deel, we had a strikingly similar GTM process for new features.