Tag: #craft
Writing on GPUs, LLMs, MLOps, Kubernetes — and mindset · 24 posts
Designing Verification — Tests as Grounds for Trust, Not Pass or Fail
A green build tells you nothing on its own. Green acquires meaning only once it is settled what you no longer have to worry about. This piece covers treating tests as grounds for trust rather than as a pass-fail gate: at
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#skills#testing#verification#craftWhat Stays Expensive — Four Things That Gain Value When Generation Gets Cheap
Answer the question "what should engineers prepare for" with a list of tools and the answer is stale in two years. This piece proposes a different axis: the skills that hold value are the ones that stay expensive to veri
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#skills#ai#craft#engineering-cultureWhy Debugging Resists Replacement — The Craft of Elimination
Debugging runs in the opposite direction from writing code. Writing produces one possible thing; debugging erases possible causes until one is left. This piece covers why debugging sits on the expensive-to-verify side, h
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#skills#debugging#craft#troubleshootingReading What Others Wrote — Entering a Codebase and Reverse-Engineering an Undocumented System
Writing gets practiced under compulsion; reading does not. That asymmetry made reading the skill everyone performs daily and nobody trains, and now that generation is cheap it is the capability whose price rose fastest.
2026-08-15 · 6 min read #career#skills#code-reading#craft#legacy-codeWhen Friction Disappears, Taste Does Not Remain — the Path to Growing Taste Disappears
Taste Is All That Is Left, the essay that drew attention in August 2026, says that as making things got cheap, the only ability left scarce is judging what is worth making. This post agrees with the diagnosis and then go
2026-08-09 · 8 min read #career#craft#ai#code-review#mentoringWhy the Claim That Code Was Never the Hard Part Makes People So Angry
An essay that reached the top of Hacker News in August 2026 argues that saying code was never the hard part is an insult to every programmer. This post agrees with the rebuttal but locates the cause somewhere else. That
2026-08-09 · 8 min read #career#craft#ai#engineering-culture#skillsHow Characters Change — The Grammar of Character Arc Design
Plot is the order of events; the arc is the change in a person. In a good story the two share the same scenes and push each other forward. Here are the three arcs — the positive one that lets go of a false belief, the ne
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #storytelling#character#fiction#narrative#craftIs the Three-Act Structure a Law or a Convention — The Lineage of Story Structure and Its Limits
It is no accident that films tend to turn at the same places. Aristotle never spoke of three acts, and the three-act structure we know today is a twentieth-century invention that became an industry standard when Syd Fiel
2026-07-26 · 13 min read #storytelling#screenwriting#narrative#film#craftWhen an AI Maintains Your Code, Write for Humans Anyway
On July 10, 2026, Scott Robinson revived an old maxim with a twist: an LLM reads your codebase as its style guide, so every shortcut you merge becomes training data it repeats back at machine scale. We walk through his d
2026-07-11 · 6 min read #ai#llm#code-quality#maintainability#craftNothing Appears Suddenly — The Compound Interest of Consistency
Skill does not appear suddenly. Abilities like coding, English, Japanese, and table tennis are built from time spent honing a little each day, accumulating like compound interest. This essay covers the buildup of small h
2026-06-19 · 30 min read #consistency#compounding#habits#craft#growthHow to Be Good at Programming — Principles, Habits, and Depth
A builder essay that defines what being good at programming actually means, then works through fundamentals and debugging, abstraction and simplicity, readable code, testing, deliberate practice, reading code, and the sk
2026-06-16 · 17 min read #programming#craft#deliberate-practice#debugging#code-qualityPKM & Markdown Note-Taking Apps 2026 Deep Dive - Obsidian, Logseq, Tana, Heptabase, Notion, Bear, Roam, AnyType, Craft
A complete 2026 survey of Personal Knowledge Management and markdown note-taking apps. Methodologies like Zettelkasten, BASB, and GTD; next-gen tools like Obsidian 1.7, Logseq, Tana, and Heptabase; mainstream picks like
2026-05-16 · 20 min read #pkm#note-taking#obsidian#logseq#tanaWriting Great Tickets: The Craft of Issues for Humans and AI Agents
The ticket is the single highest-leverage written artifact in software. The anatomy of a great ticket, acceptance criteria as checkboxes, the 'one ticket = one reviewable PR' rule, bug and feature templates, and what mak
2026-05-14 · 22 min read #tickets#issues#writing#communication#ai-agentWorking with Legacy Code — How to Change Old, Scary, Untested Code Without Fear
Legacy code is code without tests, and code you are afraid to touch. And everyone inherits it eventually. The dilemma where changing safely needs tests but adding tests needs changes, characterization tests that pin curr
2026-05-14 · 29 min read #legacy-code#refactoring#characterization-tests#strangler-fig#technical-debtSystematic Debugging — Finding Bugs by Reasoning, Not Guessing
Most debugging is undisciplined guessing. The core loop — reproduce, isolate, hypothesize, test, fix, verify — plus git bisect and binary search, how to read stack traces properly, the hard bug classes like heisenbugs an
2026-05-14 · 23 min read #debugging#methodology#engineering-craft#git-bisect#observabilityHow to Review AI-Generated Code: The Verification Discipline for Agent Output and Filtering 'AI Slop'
When AI writes the code, the bottleneck moves to review. Reviewing a human PR and reviewing agent output are different skills. The characteristic ways AI code is wrong, a verification loop that filters hallucinated APIs
2026-05-14 · 21 min read #code-review#ai-generated-code#verification#ai-slop#qualityRetro Computing for Modern Devs — 6502, Z80, Emulators, and the Lost Joy of Debugging (a 2026 deep-dive on the craft) (english)
In 2026 we live on abstractions piled on abstractions. React on top of Next.js on top of Vercel on top of Cloudflare. Somewhere in the stack we lost the ability to ask 'what is the machine actually doing?'. Retro computi
2026-05-14 · 22 min read #retro-computing#z80#nesdev#gameboy-dev#pico-8Ramping Up on an Unfamiliar Codebase Fast: The Newcomer's Craft
New job, team transfer, an inherited service — we become the newcomer over and over. Ramping up is not innate; it is a learnable skill. Get it running first, find the entry points, read the shape before the details, foll
2026-05-14 · 25 min read #onboarding#codebase#learning#newcomer#developer-craftCode That Fails Well — A Deep Dive into Error Handling and Resilience Design (2026)
Error handling is not decoration you bolt on after the feature is built — it is the design itself. Classify the kinds of failure, decide between exceptions and error values, validate at the edge and trust the core, put a
2026-05-14 · 25 min read #error-handling#resilience#retry#circuit-breaker#timeoutThe Complete Open Source Contribution Guide: From Your First PR to Becoming a Maintainer (2026)
How to contribute to open source - from opening your first PR to becoming a maintainer. An honest look at the real payoffs and the myths around learning, career, and network, plus practical guidance on choosing a project
2026-05-14 · 17 min read #open-source#contribution#github#pull-request#maintainer