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Our industry is in a weird place right now. Social media is full of software engineers sharing their struggles getting hired (or even getting an interview). There are reports of excellent engineers struggling to find a new role for six months or more. At the same time, employers are lamenting the dearth of talented candidates. It seems that hiring has gotten harder for them, too.
Read more →A few weeks ago outrage gathered around an “AI actress” called Tilly Norwood, an avatar being pitched to talent agencies as the future of acting. The character was created by Particle6, a UK production company, and everyone hated it.
Read more →Chesterton’s fence is a useful principle in software engineering (and in life): do not remove a fence until you know why it was put there in the first place. For software engineers, that means a behaviour or a line of code probably exists for a reason; remove it and you may trigger trouble.
Read more →Over the years I’ve tried all sorts of to-do apps, productivity systems, and task management tools. But I keep coming back to one approach that’s unbeatable in its simplicity: a single, prioritized, list of checkboxes.
Read more →The relational databases that many software engineers are most familiar with, e.g. Postgres or MySQL, are row-oriented: they store data row-by-row. For a given row, its columns are stored next to each other on disk. This means that fetching all the data from a row is fast.
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