/Thought Piece

Software Development Topics I've Changed My Mind On After 10 Years In The Industry

- Chris Kiehl tl;dr: Things I now believe, which past me would've squabbled with: (1) Simple is not given. It takes constant work. (2) There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity. (3) Typed languages are essential on teams with mixed experience levels. (4) Java is a great language because it's boring. (5) REPLs are not useful design tools (though, they are useful exploratory tools). And more. 

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How Might AI Change Programming?

- Thorsten Ball tl;dr: Thorsten poses questions about future implications of AI: Will this affect programming language adoption? Will code optimization shift to focus on AI readability? Could prompts replace stored code? Will we need new ways to handle AI-generated technical debt? 

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Dear CTO: It's Not 2015 Anymore

- Christine Miao tl;dr: “With AI and big tech layoffs, engineering organizations have been put under a microscope like never before. Engineering leaders need to adapt to this new normal.”

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Software Engineer Titles Have (Almost) Lost All Their Meaning

tl;dr: “Companies that resist title inflation gain a significant competitive edge. By maintaining meaningful titles, they attract and retain top talent who value authentic growth over inflated roles. This leads to more accurate hiring, improved team dynamics, and enhanced productivity. Realistic titles also foster trust, both internally and with clients, positioning the company as a beacon of integrity in the industry.”

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Machines Of Loving Grace

- Dario Amodei tl;dr: From the CEO of Anthropic: “The list of positive applications of powerful AI is extremely long, but I’m going to focus on a small number of areas that seem to me to have the greatest potential to directly improve the quality of human life. The five categories I am most excited about are: (1) Biology and physical health. (2) Neuroscience and mental health. (3) Economic development and poverty. (4) Peace and governance. (5) Work and meaning.

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The Configuration Complexity Clock

- Mike Hadlow tl;dr: “This clock tells a story. We start at midnight, 12 o’clock, with a simple new requirement which we quickly code up as a little application. It’s not expected to last very long, just a stop-gap in some larger strategic scheme, so we’ve hard-coded all the application’s values. Months pass, the application becomes widely used, but there’s a problem, some of the business values change, so we find ourselves rebuilding and re-deploying it just to change a few numbers. This is obviously wrong. The solution is simple, we’ll move those values out into a configuration file, maybe some appsettings in our App.config. Now we’re at 2 on the clock.”

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The Slow Evaporation Of The Free / Open Source Surplus

- Baldur Bjarnason tl;dr: Baldur argues we’ve been in a FOSS surplus due to the software industry’s high margins and wealth created by engineers, allowing both companies and individuals to invest in open source. “The derived FOSS surplus generates billions, if not trillions, of dollars of value for the economy and most of the costs – cost of creation, opportunity cost, and the cost of OSS competing with your more lucrative proprietary products – is absorbed by the makers.”

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Hardest Problem in Computer Science: Centering Things

- Nikita Prokopov tl;dr: Nikita discusses the struggles of properly centering text and icons despite the advances of modern CSS. He discusses problems with: (1) font metrics where the bounding box of a text block is not balanced around the cap height. (2) Line heights that complicate centering. (3) Icon fonts that convert icons into text. 

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If Inheritance Is So Bad, Why Does Everyone Use It?

- Hillel Wayne tl;dr: Hillel refers to an essay that says that inheritance is harmful and if possible you should "ban inheritance completely... “A lot of these arguments argue that in practice inheritance has problems. But they don't preclude inheritance working in another context, maybe with a better language syntax. And it doesn't explain why inheritance became so popular in the first place. I want to explore what's fundamentally challenging about inheritance and why we all use it anyway.”

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My List Of Challenging Software Projects Some Programmers Should Try

- Andrei Ciobanu tl;dr: “The project ideas I am about to suggest are mainly intended for those who are interested in exploring new areas of knowledge. However, it’s important to note that most of these ideas may not be relevant to today’s job market.” List includes lesser known data structures, distributed hash table, scientific calculator, and more. 

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