The first few chapters are dedicated to getting the user acquainted with the basics of the programming language, the system, and the base concepts that will be expanded on through the book.

Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, otherwise called CTM, by Peter van Roy and Seif Haridi is my "one book" for software development, if you need to pick one.

What I love about CTM is that it covers a huge range in topics, from programming in the small to in the large, functional programming to object oriented programming, and sequential programming to concurrent programming. Not only does it cover all these topics but, in my opinion, covers each of them sufficiently such that the reader can understand them and successfully use them correctly.

Every few months there is a news story about some AI company CEO saying that in a year almost all code will be written by AI. The software engineer, where previously having tremendous bargaining power, is going from scarcity to redundant.

The valuations are huge. Windsurf was recently bought for $3bn. Anthropic raises money on a bi-weekly cadence and most recently has a valuation of $61.5bn. Even the French are getting in on it, Mistral having a valuation of $6bn. And Cursor raised at a $10bn valuation.

The infrastructure startup Wing Cloud, creators of Winglang, recently shutdown, after receiving a $20 million investment in 2023. I did not find this surprising. Not because the developers aren’t great or because I’m a genius business person. It wasn’t surprising because the idea of Winglang went against my mental model of how technical progress happens.

The idea of Winglang is to combine application code and infrastructure code. You use a "queue" object in your code and the Winglang environment constructs the underlying cloud infrastructure for that. Maybe it’s SQS on Amazon, and something else on GCP. Not only is Winglang a new programming language but also it’s a totally different way to provision and manage infrastructure.

I recently got sent the slides for a talk titled On Bloat by Rob Pike, that can be found here. I don’t know the origin of the talk or what the intention was and only have the slides to go by.

The presentation makes the superficial observation that hardware has become significantly faster since the first mainframes yet software does not feel like it has utilized those gains well. Computers don’t boot instantly. Logging into your bank has some noticeable latency, etc.

One of the primary skills I try to impart to people that I mentor is to "think before you type". This is obviously not a new idea but I suspect, with the proliferation of LLMs to write code, that stopping to think will be a rarer skill in software engineering.

An analogy I use is that coding is like getting from A to B. You don’t start going in a direction until you know which direction you need to go. You need to understand where you want to be before even any automation can help you.

This week I implemented a pattern I find myself reaching to quite often. I call it the Match Set/Query Pattern.

The pattern is simple and requires two elements:

I was trying to use the mobile Google Authenticator app today and I couldn’t read the entire name of the last code I have installed because of the stupid floating "+" button.

The reality is, I sort of know which codes I have installed so I knew which one it was but it struck me: someone thought it was a good design system to have something that obscures the data the user is trying to look at. The Gmail app is another offender, here. The button to create a new email is floating over the list of email’s I’m looking at and obscuring the subject line. I have to scroll my email list in order to read it.

I created a Discord server. To join follow the link below.

Join Discord Server

I’ve been, rightly, downvoted in r/terraform for recommending using -target in production. I say "rightly" because I know it’s a controversial suggestion and I’ve just sort of dropped it like a bomb without defending my position. So here is my defense.