Public posts

New Software Engineering The new era of software engineering is characterized by two major currents in computing today: 1. End of Moore's Law: This means everything is embedded programming, including even server side programming. Doesn't matter if you have terabytes of RAM and hundreds of powerful CPU cores, you budget as if you are programming limited resources embedded hardware. 2. Agentic coding: There two schools of thought here. First says that humans will not directly interact with code. Instead all interactions with code will be through AI agents, just like today we don't write assembly code but use compilers. Second school counters this by pointing out that compilers are deterministic while AI agents are non-deterministic. Therefore, it's okay to get AI to generate code but human should fully review and own that code before sharing for broader review and eventually merging.

"People can be said to be perfectionists, but in the software world, perfection is simply being correct." "The way we write software currently is complete f'ed." "It’s not like we just forgot to get the milk from the supermarket or left our wallet at home every once and a while. It’s like creating Frankenstein and then, after you’ve hit it with lightning and given it life, while attempting to walk, you realize that you didn’t bolt the legs on." "Refactoring and not updating documentation or tests is a cardinal sin." "If you’ve ever played with a big box of lego bricks, you’d probably find that unless you were following specific directions, there’s a decent chance that your awesome spaceship ended up with a few weird appendages or blocks that were out of alignment. Over time, unless corrected, those blocks end up as a permanent blemish on the overall structure." "A few lines of comments describing the contents of a file are far more likely to impress anybody than any clever optimization you may attempt to do beyond them. "