Max Kanat-Alexander

I'm happy to announce that my book, Code Simplicity: The Fundamentals of Software, is now completely free: codesimplicity.com/book/

Ignorance is the enemy. Understanding is the solution.

Everybody is so focused on worrying about what's going to happen with software developers that they've missed out on the real problem. codesimplicity.com/post/the-helpf…

@karpathy Yeah, killing Reader had a lot of pretty wild unintended knock-on effects.

Finding myself going back to RSS/Atom feeds a lot more recently. There's a lot more higher quality longform and a lot less slop intended to provoke. Any product that happens to look a bit different today but that has fundamentally the same incentive structures will eventually converge to the same black hole at the center of gravity well. We should bring back RSS - it's open, pervasive, hackable. Download a client, e.g. NetNewsWire (or vibe code one) Cold start: example of getting off the ground, here is a list of 92 RSS feeds of blogs that were most popular on HN in 2025: gist.github.com/emschwartz/e6d… Works great and you will lose a lot fewer brain cells. I don't know, something has to change.

🆕 Developer Experience in the Age of AI Coding Agents youtube.com/watch?v=rT2Del… @mkanat, Executive Distinguished Engineer at @CapitalOne, drops a high energy talk on how they are getting the most value from agents - breaking out of the "vicious cycle" of bad codebase -> low quality reviews -> worse codebase and making 4 core investments to inflect to a "virtuous cycle" - where your agents accelerate instead of slopify. "I'm 8min in, and while he's saying a lot of stuff I'm nodding my head at, it's stuff over the last 3 months we've REALLY started to focus on and the improvements and productivity gains have dramatically increased. There's a few other AI Engineer videos that I think are very VERY good, just like this." - first youtube comment

What is a platform, really, and what do you need to know in order to make a great one? codesimplicity.com/post/how-to-bu…

Wow, what an amazing wealth of highly practical dev ex advice from @mkanat in his @aiDotEngineer talk. Embarrassed how much of this common sense stuff we don’t do 😬

I've been working for over 20 years in the field of developer experience. I finally wrote up a summary of all the key points I've learned in that time: codesimplicity.com/post/what-make…

Ever have to explain software development to people who are not software developers? I have developed an analogy that I've successfully used it to explain software development to a 9-year-old kid. codesimplicity.com/post/an-analog…

I'm stoked to share our first Linkedin live event at @taradotai with @mkanat principal staff software engineer at @LinkedIn and co-tech lead of their first Developer productivity and happiness framework. Max has been thinking about developer productivity for over two decades, which has culminated in this open source framework, for managers and teams to build on. During the conversation, Max and I will discuss: - What do the "right" metrics look like - Data vs Insights - How are developer productivity and happiness tied together - And how Linkedin drives developer productivity We will be taking live questions from our engineering leadership community during the event: ➡ Tuesday, February 13, 11 AM PT / 2 PM EST Link to sign up and register: lnkd.in/gE5XKVDQ

@GergelyOrosz And to be clear, we have a lot more metrics than the ones listed here. The ones we put into linkedin.github.io/dph-framework/ are just there to be examples of how to define a metric. They are in no way a complete set of what we measure. :)

Things about measuring developer productivity: 1. Yes, it's hard 2. Yes, many mid-sized and large tech companies are already doing it 3. No, you should not copy-and-paste any one of them 4. ... but yes, it's helpful to understand what they do, and (most importantly!) *why.*

Incredibly good stuff in the LinkedIn DPH Framework about how to measure #developerproductivity and happiness by @mkanat and @Grant_Jenks linkedin.github.io/dph-framework/ #dpe #devex #productivityengineering

It doesn’t matter that you wrote code. It only matters that you helped somebody or not.

Really happy that I get to share some of what I've been working on for the last four years: engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2023/prac…

Data tells you about the past and the present. To understand what’s going to happen in the future, you have to rely on principles.

Episode 28 of Building With People For People is live!! Thank you to @mkanat from LinkedIn for joining me to discuss his journey into tech, his love for music, and how his team thinks about developer productivity. podcast.unfilteredbuild.com/episodes/ep28-… #developers

I still post here sometimes, but I tend to post more on LinkedIn, nowadays: linkedin.com/in/mkanat/

One simple way to improve the readability of code: testing.googleblog.com/2023/10/improv…

Author of "Code Simplicity" and "Understanding Software,” LinkedIn's Max Kanat-Alexander talks about where platform engineering teams go wrong. thenewstack.io/platform-teams… #PlatformEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment @mkanat

If you’re on Threads, I made an account there: @codesimplicity" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">threads.net/@codesimplicity I expect to keep posting here, too. :)