/Simon Willison

Software Engineering Practices tl;dr: Simon outlines 7 recommended “software engineering practices” for development teams, including: (1) Documentation in the same repo as the code. (2) Mechanisms for creating test data. (3) Rock solid database migrations. (4) Templates for new projects and components. (5) Automated code formatting. And more.

featured in #356


Using GPT-3 To Explain How Code Works tl;dr: "One of my favourite uses for the GPT-3 AI language model is generating explanations of how code works. It’s shockingly effective at this: its training set clearly include a vast amount of source code. Simon shows a few recent examples." 

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Support Open Source That You Use By Paying The Maintainers To Talk To Your Team tl;dr: "Reach out to the maintainers and offer them generous speaking fees for remote talks to your engineering team." Simon believes that companies are more likely to spend on a one-off paid speaking opportunities than pay a monthly donation. If the maintainer is not an experienced speaker, find a member of your team to act as a host and gather questions from your engineers in advance to run the session as a Q&A.

featured in #294


Finding And Reporting An Asyncio Bug In Python 3.10 tl;dr: "I found a bug in Python 3.10 today! Some notes on how I found it and my process for handling it once I figured out what was going on."

featured in #259