This weekâs insights:
Good reading, have a nice Sunday â¤ď¸ and a great week, Stephan
If you only read one thingThe Death of the Stubborn Developer (46 minute read) âIâve recently talked to two polar-opposite companies â one where the juniors have adopted CHOP [CHat Oriented Programming], but the seniors stubbornly refuse, saying itâs a gimmick. And another where the seniors have adopted chop, but the juniors refuse, the reason being that they think it will take their jobs. Itâs craziness out there.â According to the article, all projects have interior nodes and leaf nodes. And leaf nodes are done by LLMs first, with a âminimum boost of 30% in productivity across the board â even when the engineers are grumblingâ When youâre stubborn, and do not adopt CHOP, youâre going to be left behind (not sure about CHOP vs. autocomplete vs. agents, but in principle I do agree). https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-death-of-the-stubborn-developer-b5e8f78d326b Video of the weekTypeScript types can run DOOM (6:59 minutes) This is madness and insanity. This is not executed code, this is DOOM inside the type system. The author needed to implement C inside the types with a compiler. I admire the pure genius of skills for doing this. Just keep this kind of technology out of my projects - perhaps your developers can engage in something like this to satisfy their hunger for bravado, and then write boring code again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mCsluv5FXA
Stories Iâve enjoyed this weekInterviewing Candidates Who Prepare With ChatGPT (10 minute read) Every interviewer wonders, what about ChatGPT? And while many engineering managers think about candidates using AI during the interview or for homework tasks, the article points out that candidates might upload the job ad and their CV to ChatGPT and ask for potential questions and answers. Good insights and tips (one tip, donât put too much in your job ad). https://www.interviewedge.com/articles/Interviewing-Candidates-Who-Prepare-With-ChatGPT.htm Salesforce CEO says: No more dev hiring (23 minute read) Key quote âAnd weâre not going to hire any new engineers this year. Weâre seeing 30% productivity increase on engineering, and weâre going to really continue to ride that up.â The end is near! The Little Book of Strategy (44 minute read) CTOs. Do. Not. Do. Enough. Strategy. There Iâve said it again, now listen this time. You know youâre not doing enough strategy, but where should you start? The topic is big and menacing. Here is a little (!) book of strategy No more excuses. Thank me later. https://thewavingcat.com/publications/the-little-book-of-strategy/ Defining our priorities as the CTO of a tech company (3 minute read) Over the last few weeks, Iâve been feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the number of tasks Iâm responsible for." Many of my tech management clients feel the same. The article present a way how the authors process looks like to get out. I would add: delegate, delegate, delegate as soon as possible, you have two developers, delegate. Second, learn to say no. Third: Manage your calendar or other people will manage it for you. From my experience working with CTOs: if youâre already struggling this can be fixed but is a lot of work (though you will be much happier afterwards) - so start with these three things when you have two direct reports, donât wait. https://kaiomagalhaes.com/blog/Defining-priorities-as-a-cto-of-a-tech-company Interview home coding tasks: my policy (4 minute read) A policy on how to do homework for an interview âMaximum one hour length for âfire and forgetâ testsâ Never was a fan, with AI even less a fan of (unpaid) homework for interviews. https://hunsley.io/posts/2024/interviews-home-coding-tasks/ Estimating Hidden Bug Count â Part 1/3 (18 minute read) I was quite good at mathematics in school, majored in mathematics, survived university, but statistics and statistical testing was not one of my strong points. So I find it even more amazing to estimate the number of hidden bugs in a codebase. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/estimating-hidden-bug-count-part-1-3/ Zero-Bug Software Development (13 minute read) I gave a talk about zero bug policies in 2011 and was booed off the stage. I still believe the goal is to have zero open known bugs where no one is working on. Bugs kill all sprint estimates, make you look bad as a developer and when the list is long, take considerable effort to manage, and demotivate everyone. When I join somewhere as (fractional) CTO, I close all non-critical bugs older than three months, they never get fixed. And if you want to keep them, dear product manager, Iâm happy to move them over to your ticket space. Back to the article: lots of practical advice. My advice: Classify all bugs: 1. Wonât fix + close 2. Fix ASAP 3. Requirement for future features. Then fix-bugs-first. Sidenote: Every bug severity level needs to have a clear action associated with it. Critical: Drop everything etc. If you have severity levels with no clear action attached, get rid of them. https://www.xolv.io/blog/zero-bug-software-development Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code (20 minute read) I switched to Claude some months ago, I feel the output is better than that of ChatGPT. I also daily use Claude in #Cursor. Havenât used 3.7 yet and havenât tried ChatGPT 4.5 - people often see huge differences between engines, I donât, do you? https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-7-sonnet FAQ on Microsoftâs topological qubit thing (87 minute read) Quantum computing to me feels like fusion. It has been here since decades, they have hardened all crypto against quantum computing years ago, I hear quantum computing is around the corner, we have âbreakthroughsâ every few months, but nothing materializes. Is this the breakthrough to change it? Highly doubt it, but as quantum computing is so disruptive, I also think you need to keep tabs on it. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8669 âDiscover the most wanted skills by recruitersâ For you to see what others in the market are using, or better, want to use (because they hire for it). #1 React #2 Javascript #3 Node.js #4 TS #5 Python #6 AWS #7 Java #8 Angular #9 CSS #10 PHP - so no surprises. You need to take a look for yourself if you want to see the trends. You know me as a Go lover â¤ď¸ Go is at #12! Donât call yourself a senior until youâve worked on a legacy project (8 minute read) Never thought of that, but I think working on a legacy project changes you. Been there, bought the t-shirt. Large code bases (1.5M+ LOC), no automatic tests, complicated deployments with business pressure so there is no way to get better, or the steps are too small to have real impact. Is this necessary to become a senior? Not sure. Will I add this to my requirements when interviewing seniors, yes, perhaps as a bonus (Also a technical debt book to write is in my pipeline). https://www.infobip.com/developers/blog/seniors-working-on-a-legacy-project My books Join the CTO newsletter! | |
