One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the …
Reflections of an "Old" Programmer - Ben Northrop
Framing our programming careers in terms of knowledge accumulation and decay can yield some interesting insights.
Its Time for a New Programming Language
Today, when compared to any other point in programming history, we find ourselves spoiled for choice when it comes to programming…
Reflections on a decade of coding
I've been programming professionally for about 12 years. Here are some of the things I worked on in the last 2 years.
I Started Programming When I Was 7. I'm 50 Now, and the Thing I Loved Has Changed | James Randall
I still love developing but the shifts that AI have brought are tectonic and are forcing me to re-evaluate my own relationship to building things
Sung Kim (@sungkim.bsky.social)
I like this quote on code review: "The idea that humans will reliably look through code to find the increasingly rare issues that automated tools miss seems like a fantasy." By Marc Brooker, AWS.
Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris · Adam Jacob
How Larry Wall's virtues of a Perl programmer inspire me in this era of engineering
Programming as Theory Building: Why Senior Developers Are More Valuable Than Ever
Peter Naur's 1985 theory of programming explains why experience matters more in the age of AI-generated code
Motivating Adult Learners by Introducing Programming Concepts with Scratch
Novice programmers usually fail to combine abstract concepts and knowledge into program design, even though they know the syntax and semantics of individual statement. Adult novice programmers with little computer background knowledge might face more ...
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.
The Git-ification of the World — Tim Morrissey
Why AI conquered software first, and what that tells us about which industries are next.
On AI Coding and Its Discontents - Cal Newport
Back in January, I received a note from a senior software engineer in Silicon Valley. He described himself as an AI skeptic who became converted ... Read more
“I am not a programmer” | Teleogistic
Spend a few minutes in a place where software users interact with software developers – support forums, dev trackers, face-to-face team meetings – and you’re bound to hear this phrase used (or one of its relatives: I am not [a geek|a developer|a coder|tech-savvy], etc). It’s a statement of fact, and a useful statement at that, since the kind of help offered to a “programmer” is obviously quite different from what’s offered to someone who’s not.
Bret Victor - The Future of Programming
I think this talk gives lots of food for thought. Are we too entrenched in our ways, to think in other/better ways?
Our interfaces have lost their senses
We programmed them by punching cards, plugging in wires, and flipping switches. Programmers walked among banks of switches and cables, physically choreographing their logic. Being on a computer used to be a full-body experience.
