Xima

In case you missed it, the print version of my book Strategic Software Engineering is now available worldwide! Order now at a.co/d/6yiMWBE

Last night @pydanny and I soft-launched Air, our new open-source Python web framework at @pythonph. We'll be working through the helpful feedback we got before we do a full official public launch. Stay tuned, this isn't fully live yet

We've been using the wrong mental model to describe software development AI agents and this might be limiting the value engineers can extract from these tools. buff.ly/zr4hX73 #codeassistants #llm #softwareengineering #ai

I actually played a bit with prompts to try to get it to make more questions before proposing a solution but I guess the way AIs are currently trained make extremely anxious to spit out answers.

What makes someone an expert in their field? R: Answering "it depends" to any question they get asked. So there you have it, if you want expert AIs they need to gather much more context about we are trying to achieve.

AIs will become a lot more accurate and useful when they start making questions before giving an answer

The Future of Programming buff.ly/LcQ0PEm

The digital version of my book is currently heavily discounted on the publisher's site. Go grab your copy! link.springer.com/book/10.1007/9…

To me it's still far away from something that can be trusted working with production code.

So far I've had no success doing any significant code refactoring using AI. It always ends up with code that is too bloated, it abstracts more than it should and over-complicates things. It frequently breaks nuanced use-cases or forgets something.

"...the success of your personal career is directly linked to the success of the product you are building. Moreover, your career is also directly linked to the success of your teammates..." #SoftwareEngineering #TeamWork #Career #Ownership open.substack.com/pub/strategice…

"Everything you see in Notion is a block. Text, images, lists, a row in a database, even pages themselves" notion.com/blog/data-mode…

How Postgres stores data on disk drew.silcock.dev/blog/how-postg…

Emerging Patterns in Building GenAI Products pocket.co/share/e4cbb317…

I expected Cursor Compose to be better at refactoring but I've notice it often makes small mistakes or simply forgets some piece of the code and because of that I end up not trusting it with the job. It's hard to identify these small issues within a change that involves multiple files so to ensure things won't break I prefer doing it myself.

"When reading code, you put things like values of variables, control flow logic and call sequences into your head. The average person can hold roughly four such chunks in working memory. Once the cognitive load reaches this threshold, it becomes much harder to understand things." github.com/zakirullin/cog…

"Fixing your process won't get you out of a crisis. During a crisis, your goal should be to get out of it, not to fix your operation." open.substack.com/pub/strategice… #RiskManagement hashtag#SoftwareEngineering

"as long as you are doing your work well and continuously working on the next most important thing prioritised by the business, any pressure to deliver beyond what your team is capable of is objectively unreasonable." pocket.co/share/5ed037fe…

"Software quality is more the result of a system designed to produce quality, and not so much the result of individual performance." #softwareengineering #softwarequality pocket.co/share/94666ae3…

"The point is, 480 is divisible by a lot of numbers — which provides flexibility to add or remove physical hosts while preserving uniform shard distribution." Great insights on database sharding from the Notion team notion.com/blog/sharding-…

The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks has been on my reading list longer than I'm willing to admit, but I'm happy that this has finally changed... #softwareengineering #technicalbooks #softwaredevelopment open.substack.com/pub/strategice…