“You are not allowed to ask for better people. The right system makes the wrong people do the right thing.” — maybe Russ Roberts on Econtalk1 If you follow any discussion about AI coding agents, ...

Phase1: Just ask in a separate window Phase 2:vibe coding and debt accumulation OMG! All my components are in App.tsx Refactors are good but need to be prompted Phase3:...

TDD doesn’t mean Unit Tests and why this matters even more with AI There is a common misconception that test-driven development means writing unit tests. It doesn’t. TDD just means that every line...

Good Developer, Bad Developer This document is heavily influenced by a similar document Ben Horrowitz wrote many years ago for product managers and that was also printed in his book “The Hard Thing...

As part of my series on trade-offs in software development, I want to discuss what might impact how much and what internal documentation a team should write. As with any piece of this series, many...

There is so much good writing about best practices in software development. There are articles telling you about the virtues of test-driven development, refactoring, different types of documentatio...

Over at simplermachines.com Nat Bennett published an excellent draft article on what management at Pivotal was like. Every choice comes down to trade-offs. As Nat pointed out, these practices origi...

In this post I will be going over basic communication practices for new managers. Embracing these practices will help to Make your point Avoid creating a unsafe work environment Avoid upsett...

During the first half of my career I mostly worked on SaaS products. When I started working on a on-prem system with many large enterprise customers, I quickly learned a few important differences t...

TL;DR Many companies still follow policies from a pre-remote world Remote labor will be it’s own market The remote labor market will set a new floor in many locations Roles that must be in...