Programmer as wizard, programmer as engineer

The Architect of Constraints: Why Context Engineering Is the Human Skill That Matters

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes solving it.” — Albert Einstein

“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.

The Programmer Identity Crisis ❈ Simon Højberg ❈ Principal Frontend Engineer

On AI, Creativity, and Craft

The Bulk of Software Engineering is Just Plumbing

I read a post online recently about how some software engineer was asked to complete a technically complex, jargon-filled coding challenge over the...

Hey! I'm Isaac

I like building tools, breaking workflows, and putting them back together better.

The traits of a proficient programmer

Bridging the gap between competence and proficiency

Things end users care about but programmers don't

A list of things I've noticed are important for end users but hard for programmers to understand or implement

Context Engineering | Meetup

"Context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step" - Andrej KarpathyLearn about tools, frameworks, and code that is in service of context engineering from practitioners in this space.Dive into the set of strategies fo

Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris · Adam Jacob

How Larry Wall's virtues of a Perl programmer inspire me in this era of engineering

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.

Small Programming Tricks

A lot of effective engineering comes from the accumulation of small nuggets of knowledge.

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.

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

The Case for ‘Developer Experience’

How are developers supposed to manage and coordinate fast-moving, heterogeneous systems including maintenance & operations — and free themselves to build?