1) Reflections on a decade of coding was a great read—especially the Coding section. On a similar vein, reading grug is always a good idea.

2) I like reading about security vulnerabilities. For the most part. I came out of this write-up terrified and swearing off CUPS forever. In case you think I’m exaggerating, here is a follow-up .

3) Writing a calculator app is easy, until you think about it. And the more you think about it, the harder it gets. Here’s an amazing writeup on the stock Android calculator .

4) This Xwitter thread was painful to read but I think very enlightening. It’s really a cautionary tale about how big businesses work and how bad most engineers are at navigating it!

fixing anything was requiring major surgery, even just the metrics. i spent a couple months thinking i was being challenged and growing as an engineer until i saw something so stupid it triggered a crisis of faith

“we built a new service” is news that travels further up the org chart than “we changed the addressing scheme so the primary key index actually works”

5) These “Debugging strategies ” are useful. Debugging is one of the most important skills programmers develop, and getting better at it tends to result in massive performance improvements!

6) Here are some videos and explainers I’ve found useful for grokking LLMs better:

These come recommended but I haven’t had the time to go through them yet:

9) And finally, a couple of links in the very popular “how I use LLMs” sub-genre that I found particularly insightful.

My current favorite mental model is to think of them as an over-confident pair programming assistant who’s lightning fast at looking things up, can churn out relevant examples at a moment’s notice and can execute on tedious tasks without complaint.