Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

I am often asked what I mean when I say that developers spend most of their time figuring the system out. Let’s unpack the statement.

The 10 Best Practices for Remote Software Engineering

At face value, when we think of developer productivity we might think of effectiveness in time management, communication, and task completion.14 Although we are drawn to personal workflow or time management tools, and learning secrets to improving our productivity, ironically this quest for the holy grail can sometimes take us off course and be a detriment to our productivity. The problem is that accomplishing tasks or having a filled up schedule does not necessarily equate to productivity. Creating a formulaic working strategy, as was common in the last century, does not either.a,8,13 Productivity is less a quality that can be easily measured,b controlled, or improved directly with tools, but instead is a human element that manifests from developer happiness.

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it

We are all Product Engineers now | Seldo.com

Agents are eating the software development lifecycle from the bottom up — code generation already gone, review and ops following fast. What remains is figuring out what people actually want, which can't be automated or scaled. That job is called product engineering, it pays $240k, and nobody's training for it.

Software Acceleration and Desynchronization

A look at the ever-present drive to make software delivery faster and how it might break down various activity loops in organizations.

Aaron Boodman on Twitter / X

There is this tension in dev tooling right now: Lots of people want to self-host, and not depend on a service. Lots of people also want the vibes of open source - being part of an open development community, having the code, etc.But builders still need to make a living...— Aaron Boodman (@aboodman) January 23, 2024

The Tyranny of Time

licensing gives developers much-needed flexibility

Differ - Adaptive Software

Build software that adapts to each user — without forks or feature flags. One codebase, infinite variants.

Differ - Adaptive Software

Build software that adapts to each user — without forks or feature flags. One codebase, infinite variants.

Pure and impure software engineering

Why do solo game developers tend to get into fights with big tech engineers? Why do high-profile external hires to large companies often fizzle out? Why is AI-assisted development amazing for some engineers and completely useless for others?

Developer Experience is User Experience

Developer experience encompasses all aspects of the developer’s interaction with the company, its services and its products

Programmer as wizard, programmer as engineer

Context matters. Sometimes we need to get things done, sometimes we need to build things to last.

Trying the Software factory pattern.

One of the interesting challenges of the AI ecosystem in 2026 is that new, effective patterns emerge faster than I can adopt them. I’ll find a handful, get back to work, and realize a month later that I’d missed four or five more. The adoption cycle for Imprint this year has been something like: January: get every engineer onto Claude Code every single day March: ok, let’s also get everyone else onto Claude Code or Claude Cowork every single day April: local development is bottlenecked on checkout and worktree model, instead create ~10 local workspaces which each have an independent checkout of every repository, and operate at the workspace level, not at the repository level, so it can generate cross-repository pull requests across frontend, backend, infrastructure and data monorepos June: oh boy, agent-driven development is heavily constrained by lack of a common task management system with higher visibility and less permission complexity than Jira, so let’s migrate the entire company over to Linear and hard stop on Jira July: yikes, now we have visibility into all these tickets, many of them are trivial but managing them through local development isn’t scaling, let’s roll out an orchestrated harness which internally we call “Agent Fleet”, along the lines of Stripe’s Minions The most recent question for me has been figuring out how to adopt the software factory pattern. (After some light research, the specific AI-context origin of this term is slightly messy to attribute, but I think it might be Justin McCarthy in February 2026’s Software Factories And The Agentic Moment.)

Cracks in Containerized Development

Nerd rants about developing software in isolation from the home system; toolbx, distrobox, devcontainers, nix, etc