Posts - Page 2

It’s been four months since I left my job at a startup. I say “left”, but it was somewhat involuntary: I had worn myself down so much that I couldn’t continue.

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.

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.

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.

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.