Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
Are We Really Engineers?
This is part one of the Crossover Project. Part two is here and part three is here. A conference talk based on this work is now available here. I sat in front of Mat, idly chatting about tech and cuisine. Before now, I had known him mostly for his cooking pictures on Twitter, the kind that made me envious of suburbanites and their 75,000 BTU woks. But now he was the test subject for my new project, to see if it was going to be fruitful or a waste of time.
Gergely Orosz on Twitter / X
What can us, engineers else learn from designers and design engineers? Turns out there’s lots, based on talking with one of the best design engineers in the industry, @Mappletons.Timestamps:00:00 Intro03:24 From anthropology to tech10:18 What does a designer do?18:23 How… pic.twitter.com/wFlNLnUdTI— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) September 23, 2026
These engineering students made a self playing piano from scratch
Brittany's Blog | Brittany Ellich | Offprint
Software engineer, newsletter writer, and podcast host writing about AI, accessibility, and building a sustainable engineering career without burning out.
A Practical Model for Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)
“People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole” – Theodore Levitt The concept of jobs to be done provides a lens through which to understand value creation. The approach loo…
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.
Small Programming Tricks
A lot of effective engineering comes from the accumulation of small nuggets of knowledge.
tldraw's Steve Ruiz: The Infinite Canvas & the Death of Traditional Design
Design Engineering with Maggie Appleton
Design Engineering with Maggie Appleton
Podcast Episode · The Pragmatic Engineer · September 23 · 1h 27m
The Press Release Is Dead — Use This Instead – Mike Butcher
I’m QUITE TIRED of dealing with MILLIONS of tech entrepreneurs (these days there are a HELL of a lot of you) and (some) PR people who have ZERO clue how to pitch me/TechCrunch/the media. Their pitches are long-winded and rambling. They ask if they could ‘send some more information’. Listen, I have no idea if it’s interesting or not until you send it! Many just ask me out to lunch or coffee. (Thanks, but I prefer hanging out with my *actual friends*). Even worse, they haven’t read this post or seen my presentation on how to deal with tech media. [2021 update: This is a basic outline for super-early startups. If you want something for Post Series A / later stage startups go here].
Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris · Adam Jacob
How Larry Wall's virtues of a Perl programmer inspire me in this era of engineering
Reversing the technical interview
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have shifted during the night–the incorporeal equivalent of rummaging through that drawer in the back of the kitchen where we stash odd flanges, screwdrivers, and the strangely specific plastic bits: the accessories, those long-estranged black sheep of the families of our household appliances, their original purpose now forgotten, perhaps never known, but which we are bound to care for nonetheless. I’d like to walk you through a common interview question: reversing a linked list.