Weeknote #81 (20260412-20260418)

meta

One of those, “what did I even do?” kinda weeks …but as I write up the “did” section below, I’m realizing I did quite a bit.

did

  • Got to 100% achievements on Ball x Pit — first time I’ve ever done that on a video game, I think
  • Got a Covid booster jab, since it had been six months
  • On Tuesday, I went to my first Whisky Club at Pintxo’s, it was nice
  • Wednesday was the April Hack Salem meeting, it went pretty well
  • Thanks to a Ben Brown blog post, I impulse-bought a dedicated MP3 player; kinda hoping it is a good motivator to finish my project to clean up my MP3 collection and get a routine Bandcamp download/sync routine going. It showed up Thursday, but all I’ve had time to do is drop some music on it and generally get an idea of how it works
  • I’m traveling for a good chunk of the upcoming two weeks, so I took Friday off — I had hoped to make more progress on sifting the remaining dirt, but things were still too moist to work with
  • Saturday I set up a 4x8 raised bed frame, as well as a couple of elevated “deck boxes”. Unfortunately, didn’t have time to actually plant anything, but it’s also pretty cool overnight still…

read

  • “If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems”

    And here’s the bit that really keeps me up at night: a lot of this AI-generated code? Nobody fully understands it. The person who “wrote” it didn’t really write it. They prompted it, skimmed it, maybe ran it once. When it breaks in production at 2am, the person on-call didn’t write it and the person who prompted it can’t explain it. You’ve just increased the surface area for incidents while decreasing the number of humans who can reason about the system.

  • I like this one but probably mainly because I agree with basically all of it: "How I Run a Fully-Remote Software Engineering Standup "

    I’ve been participating in fully-remote software standups every day for over a decade, and over the past two years, leading them, too. Here’s how I run the best standup meetings that I can.

  • “Every layer of review makes you 10x slower”

    By the time your review catches a mistake, the mistake has already been made. The root cause happened already. You’re too late.

  • “The peril of laziness lost” (via Simon Williamson’s mention)

    “Laziness” here being used in the Larry Wall “three virtues of a programmer” sense:

    The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone’s) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters. As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don’t want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones. The best engineering is always borne of constraints, and the constraint of our time places limits on the cognitive load of the system that we’re willing to accept.

  • current unread count: 215 (sigh)

watched

The Timbers flail around hopelessly against the Loons

cooked

  • Sunday: steak enchiladas
  • Monday: chicken tortilla soup
  • Saturday: grilled sausages, caprese salad