The virtuous circle is the most powerful pattern in developer tooling. And it's the myth of the 10x developer that makes it hard to see.
Bjarnason: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity
Baldur Bjarnason argues that development tools win by making developers replaceable. The JVM ran that experiment three times, against Visual Basic's precedent, through EJB's committee, and into Spring's reversal, and the results say his theory is exactly half of a whole.
Making tools for game developers — Codecks
Rather than use a tool that assumes order and fails when faced with the reality of game development, we're building a tool that assumes chaos and, in spite of that, reduces the stress that comes with it.
Mystical
I wanted to make a programming language that resembled magical circles. This is more like a way to write PostScript that looks like a magical circle, but I will refer to it as Mystical in this document.
The peril of laziness lost | The Observation Deck
In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris: If we’re going to talk about good software design, we have to talk about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, the basis of good software design. We’ve all fallen into the trap of using cut-and-paste when we should have defined a higher-level abstraction, if only just a loop or subroutine. To be sure, some folks have gone to the opposite extreme of defining ever-growing mounds of higher level abstractions when they should have used cut-and-paste. Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less.
Vim anti-patterns | Arabesque
The benefits of getting to grips with Vim are immense in terms of editing speed and maintaining your “flow” when you’re on a roll, whether writing code, poetry, or prose, but because the learning curve is so steep for a text editor, it’s very easy to retain habits from your time learning the editor that stick with you well into mastery. Because Vim makes you so fast and fluent, it’s especially hard to root these out because you might not even notice them, but it’s worth it. Here I’ll list some of the more common ones.
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.
Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris · Adam Jacob
How Larry Wall's virtues of a Perl programmer inspire me in this era of engineering
The Making of Cursor's Icons
A year of drawing, testing, and shipping a complete icon system for the world's favourite coding agent.
Nova Rounding Border-Radius Adjustment Variables
64 votes, 26 comments. For those of you who would like to adjust the heavy rounding of all of the elements in the new Nova theme to slightly less…
Convivial Computing Salon #6: Convivial design heuristics for software systems
Priivacy-ai/spec-kitty
Spec-Driven Development for serious software developers. Spec Coding with with Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Codex. Kanban dashboard, git worktrees, auto-merge and more.
Pure CSS halftone patterns: dots, lines, circles
A project overdue. As an 80's/90's kid, I was obsessed with printing technology - and especially halftone patterns. I've long theorized that these pat
aesthetics
Aesthetics is relevant to many aspects of computing. Here, we are mostly concerned of the superficial visual appearances and their technological bases.
Mythical man month : 10 lines per developer day - NDepend Blog
February 10, 2020 4 minutes read The mythical book, Mythical man month quotes that no matter the programming language chosen, a professional developer will write on average 10 lines of code (LoC) day. After 14 years of full-time development on the tool NDepend I’d like to elaborate a bit here. Let’s start with the definition of logical … Continue reading Mythical man month : 10 lines per developer day
