This week's video for Dave Farley's Continuous Delivery YouTube channel is me ranting about why reading code sucks, and offering some advice on how to improve. "Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. ... Read more
Stop saying learning to code is easy.
(The photo above was taken at the Microsoft NYC office of three amazing young ...
Tinkered Thinking
Daily, snackable writings to spur changes in thinking.Building a blueprint for a better brain by tinkering with the code.
We asked 15,000 people who they are, and how they’re learning to code
More than 15,000 people responded to the 2016 New Coder Survey, granting researchers an unprecedented glimpse into how adults are learning to code. We’ve released the entire dataset of participants’ individual responses to all 48 questions — under th...
Live Coding: A User's Manual
Live Coding: A User's Manual, published by MIT Press
In defense of not reading the code | Ben Shoemaker
Last week, I wrote an article whose purpose was to discuss where I saw AI-assisted coding going. That's not what generated 200 comments worth of passionate...
We should rethink how we teach people to code | deadSimpleTech
It's fair to say that the tech industry at the moment is not in a good place. Software engineers tend to be detached, demotivated and unwilling to care much about the work they're doing beyond their paycheck. Code quality is poor on the whole, made worse by the current spate of vibe coding and whatever other febrile ideas come out of Sam Altman's brain. Much of the software that we write is either useless or actively hurts people. And the talented, creative people that we most need in the industry are pushed to the margins of it.
What Is Code? If You Don't Know, You Need to Read This
The world belongs to people who code. Those who don’t understand will be left behind.
What Is Code? If You Don't Know, You Need to Read This
The world belongs to people who code. Those who don’t understand will be left behind.
To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
MIT neuroscientists have found reading computer code does not rely on the regions of the brain involved in language processing. Instead, it activates the “multiple demand network,” which is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles.
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.
Learnable Programming
Here's a trick question: How do we get people to understand programming?
jack on Twitter / X
i now spend 2-3 hours per day reading research papers and building something with goose that i didn't think it capable of doing. i never see a line of code, and never trapped in an IDE.it works nearly every time, but does requires some nudging every now and then. incredible.— jack (@jack) June 4, 2025
Review of Claude Code-generated code for a bookshop, March 2026
Review of Claude Code-generated code for a bookshop, March 2026 · GitHub
The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding
A field guide and why we need to rethink our expectations
Rationally irrational
I waste a lot of time sweating small details of code. Stuff that has absolutely zero impact on anything quantifiable. It took me a long time to stop feeling bad about this. I’m not talking about tu…
