Another batch of links, coming your way! While I’m a little sad this weekly didn’t follow on the heels of #29, I can’t complain too much. I spent some time working on a new side project!

I’m working on my own little algorithmic newsfeed prioritized by what I think is most important. I subscribe to a ton of RSS feeds that all publish on different frequencies. I want to make sure that infrequent publishers are never drowned out by more frequent posters. Whenver I check the feed, I want posts from weekly authors for this week to show up alongside posts from monthly authors for this month before any content from daily newsletters. At this point I’ve set up a lot of the infrastructure to ingest RSS feeds and spit out a ranked version. Next is actually working on a good algorithm!

Anyways, I’ve still got a lot of thoughts on articles I’ve read over the past few weeks. Time to get to it!

Engineering Management

• Seeing like a software company (Sean Goedecke): I’ve often thought about why large organizations are so ineffecient. In the past I’ve chalked it up to the coordination overhead between any two people that scales exponetnionally in larger networks. But Sean Goedecke makes a stronger claim that efficienty is intentionally sacrificed for legibility and steerability.

  I’ve only recently stumbled upon Goedecke’s writing, but his experience inside GitHub (which itself is inside the much-larger Microsoft) offers an interesting perspective that isn’t often present on the indie blogosphere.

• Transparent Leadership Beats Servant Leadership (Christoffer Stjernlöf): This post really struck a chord with me and in many ways has helped me set a new north star for my career. Christoffer presents a view of management as coaching and facilitation over top-down decision making.

  After your team is more-or-less autonomous, what then? “The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a paper-shuffler.” Managers often have a birds-eye view that can give insight into what tasks can be particularly high-leverage at any given moment. The manager-as-spare-worker lets the team stay focused while they jump in and let themselves be redirected more aggressively.

• Why I Ignore The Spoltight as a Staff Engineer (Lalit Maganti): I feel like a lot of ink has been spilled refuting Sean Goedecke’s various posts over the past few months. All these takes complement the opinion they’re refuting invalidate them. Lalit’s post is a great counter-narrative about how to dive deep within an organization.

  I appreciated that Lalit called out that “The foundational reason for our diverging paths is that Sean and I operate in entirely different worlds with different laws governing them.” Product engineering and infrastructure have different incentives, and Sean doesn’t have to be “wrong” for Lalit to be “right”. Different experience can lead us to different conclusions, and that’s okay!

Tech and Society

• Software Engineers Are Not Politicians (Alex Wennerberg): Another Goedeke repsonse piece that I enjoyed. The part on “delivering value” was an expecially interesting read. Sticking to what’s valuable, and having an understanding of value beyond the price tag or revenue number, is paramount to actually building something that can last.

• The Resonant Computing Manifesto: Another piece on the topic of value in technology. There’s been a lot of talk about AI as a force for enshittification. But the inflection point that we’re at could point in another direction: “we can now build technology that adaptively shapes itself in service of our individual and collective aspirations. We can build resonant environments that bring out the best in every human who inhabits them.”

  I support the idea wholeheartedly — I’ve thought a bit of what LLM-enhanced Programmable Ink would look like. But it seems like the economic energy is already moving towards passive consumption platforms that Sora has shown us a preview of.

  Programmers and technoligists have for a long time championed computing as a means of creation even as computers have been used by most of the public as a means of consumption. Revealed preference is a stronger force than stated preference, unfortunately, and I’m not sure what we can do about that.

• Ghostty Is Now Non-Profit (Mitchell Hashimoto): Nothing much to add here. Just excited to see Mitchell continuing to do the right thing with Ghostty!

Actual Software

• Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig (Sinclair Target): PL comparisons are one of the most emotional and least productive sub-genres of technical writing. This was the most thoughtful and first-principles-driven language comparison I’d read on the topic in a while. Explaining when each language is useful in its own context was a great addition that I wish more people took into account when comparing programming languages.

• We are in the “gentleman scientist” era of AI research (Sean Goedecke): This was an interesting thought for me. There’s a capability overhang with existing LLMs and also an engineering overhang in how to most effectively train a transformer model that the barrier to entry is not particularly high for novel research. Who knows when that door will close, but it hasn’t happened yet!

• The CRDT Dictionary (Ian Duncan): This was an amazing resource to encounter! A single page is pretty limiting, though. I really wish there was better browse-ability and categorization among all these different kinds of CRDTs. The interactive demos were also enlightening.

• I Tried Glean for Advent of Code, and I Get the Hype (Oscar Molnar): I got a chuckle out of how much of this article boiled down to standard library functions derived from OCaml rather than anything unique about Glean as a language.