The honeymoon for remote work is over , and managers who never liked the concept to begin with are plotting its complete reversal, so that things may return to how they were before The Great Remote Ex
This is the latest issue of my newsletter. Each week I cover the latest research and perspectives on developer productivity. This week I read Which Factors Influence Practitioners' Usage of Build Auto
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mi
As a programmer, you use hash functions every day. They're used in databasesto optimise queries, they're used in data structures to make things faster,they're used in security to keep data safe. Almos
One of the more fascinating aspects of large language models is their ability to improve their output through self reflection . Feed the model its own response back, then ask it to improve the respons
A lawyer representing a man who sued an airline relied on artificial intelligence to help prepare a court filing. It did not go well. As an Avianca flight approached Kennedy International Airport in N
Let's imagine a leadership team meeting with a cost-cutting proposal on the agenda from the Chief Information Officer to increase centralization of shared IT resources. The CIO and their team have pre
Introduction If you haven’t made a resolution for 2022 yet (or you’ve already fallen off the bandwagon for the one you did select), it’s not too late to reset and reaffirm your intentions for the rema
This is the latest issue of my newsletter. Each week I cover research, opinion, or practice in the field of developer productivity and experience. This week is an article I wrote about cycle time. Man
Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. I f the job-search firm Monster.com is right in its survey research , you are probably looking fo
Photo cred: my dad For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in c
Recently I gave a guest lecture in a graduate level software engineering course on the value of technical writing for software engineers. This post is a sort of rough transcript of my talk. I live-ske
For refrigerators across America, the passing of Thanksgiving promises a major purge. The good stuff is the first to go: the mashed potatoes, the buttery remains of stuffing, breakfast-worthy cold pie
7 min read · 3 days ago “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan” — Eliel Sa
Lua is probably my favourite “little language” - a language designed to have low cognitive load, and be easy to learn and use. It’s embedded in a lot of software, such as Redis , NGINX via OpenResty a
Chris van Tulleken refuses to tell me what to have for breakfast. “Everyone thinks that I have a strong opinion about what they should eat,” he tells me, as I hesitate between the eggs Benedict and th
All around the world, teams large and small assemble at offsite locations to take a step away from their day-to-day work and build team spirit. Unfortunately, many team building offsites turn out to b
Recently someone asked me what my principles are for DevEx. Over the past 15 years shipping products for Heroku, GitHub, and now Vercel, I've learned a lot about what developers need to succeed. Still
Why Chatbots Are Not the Future Last night, over wine and seafood, the inevitable happened... Someone mentioned ChatGPT. I had no choice but to start into an unfiltered, no-holds-barred rant about cha
Credit... Grant Cornett for The New York Times. Set designer: JoJo Li. Can you tell the difference between a $10,000 Chanel bag and a $200 knockoff? Almost nobody can, and it’s turning luxury fashion
One of the most fruitful areas of the human brain is the habit formation ability . The idea of doing something without actually thinking about it is astonishing. Your mind can be tired. But your body
If you enjoy what you do, productivity will take care of itself Published in Better Humans · 3 min read · Jan 4, 2022 Photo: Brooke Cagle/Unsplash The secret to getting real work done every day withou
When I think back on the software engineers I looked up to, they all shared this trait where they never took anything at face value. They regularly questioned statements that did not make sense to the
Whether it’s based on hallucinatory beliefs or not, an artificial-intelligence gold rush has started over the last several months to mine the anticipated business opportunities from generative AI mode
Part of the issue The 100-year-old-mistake that’s reshaping the American West from The Highlight , Vox’s home for ambitious stories that explain our world. The Colorado River provides water for irriga
“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” —Charles Darwin, “On the Origin of Species” Isn’t it interesting that for all the talk
We spend a lot of time working on things that nobody else knows exists. A seemingly simple act of serving up a photostream with infinite scroll may require global infrastructure, aggressive caching an
This is the latest issue of my newsletter. Each week I cover research, opinion, or practice in the field of developer productivity and experience. This week is an article I wrote about selecting metri
I’m always writing blog posts on how to improve your skills and do more of what you enjoy. But there’s a type of response I’ve gotten used to receiving: “But what are my skills?” “But what do I enjoy?
The Matrix, 1999 Years ago, entrepreneurs and innovators predicated that “software would eat the world” . And to little surprise, year after year, the world has become more and more reliant on softwar
“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” ~Gandhi Both the industrial and digital revolutions promised increased productivity, meaning people could work less and live a more balanced life. We all kn
Closing time, every new beginning Comes from some other beginning’s end, yeah “Closing Time”, Semisonic Have you ever found yourself saying: That movie was pretty good, but it would’ve been great if i
A lot of people I talk to are unhappy with their ability to get stuff done in their lives. They feel they’re wasting a lot of time, never really getting anything important done. What I like to play wi
Bouncing on a medicine ball while loudly shushing, one of us (Leidy) was trying to get his newborn back to sleep. Keeping hold of his crying son, while maintaining the rhythm, Leidy heroically wriggle
I was something like the tenth engineer hired at Facebook. When a bunch of usold-timers get together we love to dive into nostalgia around all the time wespent together. And people who weren’t there l
I started my career in programming during heydays of Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE). This was late 90s/early 00s, and there was a rich ecosystem of enterprise vendors hawking application servers, moni
Success is commonly defined as reaching one’s goals. Getting accepted into a prestigious program, building a profitable business, becoming a doctor, completing an online course… Whatever the goal may
Am I an Effective manager? That is the million-dollar question every manager wants to know – we all want to be good at our jobs, we crave that satisfaction in knowing we are delivering impact and nurt
Announcement: “All passengers for Chicago at 11:45, please come to gate A14 immediately for an earlier departure.” This came through at 10:35 am, after that 11:45 to Chicago was delayed by three hours
Published in Level Up Coding · 4 min read · May 3, 2022 -- When I was in college, I found myself constantly trying to find the highest paying job or the most elusive role. This landed me nearly a hund