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Mass surveillance will not keep us safe, it will endanger us further and damage our democracies and freedoms in irreparable ways. We must fight to keep our right to privacy, and use of strong end-to-end encryption to protect ourselves, our friends, our family, and yes also to protect the children.

The goal isn’t to create “balanced” engineers with no pronounced strengths or weaknesses... We want self-aware engineers who understand their natural tendencies and can adjust them based on what each situation demands.

[AI is] giving us a chance to reclaim those broader aspects of our role that we gave away to specialists. To return to a time when software engineering meant more than just writing code. When it meant understanding the whole problem space, from user needs to business impact, from system design to operational excellence.

...I realized something important: if you ever think you might need a parachute, you’d better start knitting it early.

Understanding this history isn’t just an academic exercise; it’s practical knowledge. It reveals why certain best practices exist...

Engineering is often framed as a purely technical discipline—master the code, build the product, and ship the features. But that’s an incomplete story. Communication is not a 'soft skill' It’s a core product driver.

...tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.

Understanding legacy code, how to prevent it, and how to fix it

Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.

...it turns out that even fluffy and harmless things are absolutely terrifying if you make them big enough.

...one significant change has occurred in my daily work routine: I’ve been forced to start working in sprints (usually 1-2 weeks) instead of spending larger chunks of time on larger projects. This shift has had some unfortunate consequences.

There is a level where a leader is separated from the rest of team, but not yet part of the executive layer. ...the reality is that they are mainly entrusted to re-transmit decisions made by others, and primarily exist to execute on behalf of the business.

Are persistent and obstinate people actually behaving differently?

I believe if you stick closer to core web technologies, you’ll be better able to hire capable engineers in the future without them convincing you they can’t do work without rewriting millions of lines of code.

To be great, you need to be polarizing... Have opinions, say those opinions out loud.

If I say you got lucky, I look jealous. If I tell myself that I got lucky, I feel diminished.

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

The average essay is written not to be read, but to be found—by a search engine, that is—so it can monetize every fiber of your eyeballs.

Why broken windows theory should stay in criminology where it belongs

Corruption everywhere, even in YouTube's kids content

The smaller the change, the less memorable the time.

Why is it that punched paper tape and the teleprinter were the most obvious way to interact with the first electronic computers? As you might suspect, the arrangement was one of convenience.

Imagine if all these programmer hours spent on all these products actually centered around a proper standard, which evolved along with consumers' needs rather than these companies' ongoing need to fiddle with the knobs and sliders until profit comes out. The thing is, if this actually happened, then what would these employees spend their time on? At some point society would be pretty much done implementing messaging software.

What I discovered by casting a wide net was that I have very little ability to predict how useful a call will be in advance. Relevance is easier to predict, but it’s not a very good proxy for usefulness, which is a product of lots of other things including the other person’s enthusiasm and the breadth of their interests.

The Shirky principle is the adage that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. More broadly, it can also be characterized as the adage that “every entity tends to prolong the problem it is solving”.

Everyone who says 'tech debt' assumes they know what we’re all talking about, but their individual definitions differ quite a bit.

“Have nothing in your home,” wrote Morris, the father of the Arts and Crafts movement, which aimed to elevate the lives of the working and middle classes, “that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” This would be a tall order nowadays.

There’s a mismatch between what we thought doing a good job was and what a significant part of the industry considers profitable, and I think that explains the increasing discomfort of many software professionals.

Imprecise asks from managers and leaders cause a disproportionate amount of turmoil and wheel-spinning. To combat this, leaders should be very precise with the amount of time investment they’re asking for when they ask for things.

As a CEO, even if you’re hyper productive, you can’t do everything you want to do – and you shouldn’t...But you do have the prerogative of doing anything you want in and around your company as long as you do it the right way.

Within the Grift Shift paradigm the topics and technologies addressed are mere material for public personalities to continuously claim expertise and 'thought leadership' in every cycle of the shift regardless of what specific technologies are being talked about.

Or, how to ensure you learn absolutely nothing.

Prioritization is an euphemism for sacrificing.

There’s an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web...Then there’s the tech-savvy web.

We humans have little short term memory, and tend to forget things over time. Our screens offers only a small window, and even the smartest IDE can’t give us instant access to everything. It’s easier for us to act upon code that we’ve just read. It’s even easier to act upon code we can see right there on the screen.

The next time you start on a major project, I want you to write code for a couple of days and then delete it all. Just throw it away...And you should probably have some of your best engineers doing this throwaway work. It's going to save you time in the long run.

What I’d really like to share with you more than anything else is my sense of wonder at the storage systems that are all collectively being built at this point in time, because they are pretty amazing. In this post, I want to cover a few of the interesting nuances of building something like S3, and the lessons learned and sometimes surprising observations from my time in S3.

...any time someone achieves success in a way they don't want to admit publicly, they have to come up with an excuse for their abilities. And that means misleading a bunch of people into (potentially) wasting their time, or worse.

My first hype exposure was 'use the Extensible Markup Language for everything'. Learning from it allowed me to live through the front end stack explosion, the micro-service overdose and many, many more silly trends.

Same with programming and software engineering: I really, really don’t like greenfield projects. There are too many options. Too many tools to chose and decisions to be made. All of the code has to be written, including the boilerplate and the boring stuff.