Tag: #software-engineering
Writing on GPUs, LLMs, MLOps, Kubernetes — and mindset · 17 posts
Is AI Code Review Actually Worth It — What Measured Evidence Says About Accuracy and False Positives
Marketing copy for AI code review tools is full of numbers like "80% of PRs need no human comment," yet almost none of it publishes precision and false-positive rates alongside. Pull the public measurements together and
2026-07-17 · 25 min read #ai#code-review#static-analysis#evaluation#software-engineeringThe Craft of a Forward Deployed Engineer: Requirement Archaeology, Domain Modeling, and Optimizing for Adoption
A previous post mapped the knowledge an FDE needs — Linux, networking, Kubernetes, databases, security. That map gets you in the door. It says nothing about what you actually do once you are inside a customer's building,
2026-07-15 · 10 min read #career#fde#solutions-engineering#software-engineering#palantirFive Habits for Working Well with AI Coding Tools
The same tool produced a 55.8% gain in one experiment and a 19% loss in another. What flipped the sign was not the tool, but how it was used. Five habits drawn from METR, the GitHub Copilot RCT, the Stack Overflow survey
2026-07-12 · 10 min read #ai#productivity#software-engineering#developer-experienceWhat to Learn Deeply, What to Skim — A Learning Strategy for the AI Era
When an AI answers almost anything in three seconds, what is still worth learning deeply? Cognitive psychology has an uncomfortable answer: memory is built by pulling information out of your own head, not by having it ha
2026-07-12 · 12 min read #career#learning#ai#software-engineeringFrom Senior to Staff: What Actually Gets Evaluated
Plenty of engineers believe that shipping more, faster, is the path to promotion. But open an actual public engineering ladder — Dropbox, CircleCI, Rent the Runway — and there is no axis called output. There is scope, co
2026-07-12 · 12 min read #career#software-engineering#growth#staff-engineerWhen Code Generation Gets Cheap, Which Skills Go Up in Value — What Depreciates and What Appreciates
When code generation becomes cheap and abundant, value does not vanish — it moves to whatever is still a bottleneck. Right now that bottleneck is verification, judgment, and integration. Building on Jason Wei's asymmetry
2026-07-12 · 14 min read #career#software-engineering#ai#skills#code-reviewDoes AI Actually Make Developers Faster? What the Measured Numbers Say
Two randomized controlled trials reached opposite conclusions. One found developers using AI were 55.8% faster. The other found they were 19% slower. But METR, who produced the second number, published a follow-up in Feb
2026-07-12 · 18 min read #career#ai#productivity#software-engineering#developer-experienceThe 2026 Developer Job Market — What the Data Shows, and What It Does Not
It feels like the worst market in a decade, yet BLS projects 15% growth over ten years. Both are true. I pulled the raw Indeed postings index (Feb 2020 = 100, peak 233.87 in Feb 2022, 72.51 in June 2026), layoffs.fyi (12
2026-07-12 · 9 min read #career#job-market#software-engineering#hiringCoding Benchmarks Are Misaligned with the Agent Era — Three Reasons Leaderboards Compare Agents Wrong
A position paper from a Tessl team, posted to arXiv in June 2026, argues that today's coding benchmarks are fundamentally misaligned with agentic software engineering. Benchmarks were built to measure a single model, yet
2026-07-11 · 5 min read #ai#agents#evaluation#software-engineering#coding-benchmarksPreparing to Become a Forward Deployed Engineer: A Map of the Software Knowledge That Matters
A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is a role Palantir invented: an engineer who embeds with a customer and deploys, integrates, and configures the product inside the client's real environment. The role is surging again as
2026-07-11 · 6 min read #career#fde#software-engineering#palantir#solutions-engineeringWorking 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#qualityRamping 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-craftA Developer's Next Career Is 'Builder' — As the 'Engineer' Era Wanes, What Should You Prepare? (2026)
A PM at Meta calls himself an 'AI builder', LinkedIn launched a 'full stack builder' program, and Walmart's 'agent builder' roles were filled by non-developer employees. The creator of Anthropic's Claude Code says 'codin
2026-05-14 · 14 min read #career#builder#ai-era#developer-career#vibe-codingAuthoring Reviewable Pull Requests: Small PRs, Good Descriptions, and Stacked Diffs
Review latency is controlled by the author. Why small PRs win, the 'one PR = one idea' rule, the PR description as your most important artifact, making the diff readable, stacked PRs, self-review, responding well to feed
2026-05-14 · 24 min read #pull-request#code-review#git#stacked-prs#collaborationHow Is Large-Scale Software Developed, Managed, and Maintained? — Including SW Update Systems
How is software with millions of lines of code, developed by thousands of engineers, built, updated, and maintained? A deep dive from architecture to deployment strategies and auto-update systems.
2026-04-11 · 11 min read #devops#software-engineering#architecture#update-system#large-scale