Articles

swizec.com is now on TimberJS, a new React framework

swizec.com is 20 years old and has gone through many rewrites. Here's the latest

The one thing every experienced engineer gets wrong

In the last few months every engineer I hired stumbled in exactly the same way: Project management. They learned quickly, but that first big project has become a rite of passage.

Theory of constraints, AI, and code review

Feedback from an expert is how you learn taste. Your code doesn't matter until it's shipped.

Using vibes to rewrite my blog

The death of engineering has been greatly exaggerated. You still need to know what you're doing.

You get what you hire

Hiring engineers is like deciding what kind of system you'll have. This seems obvious but surprised me to see first-hand.

Code is the easy part, or how we refactored half the business to fix a janky script

This is a classic startup war story: Someone had built a leaky rowboat. It worked! Then we started flying the rowboat as a Cessna. What we needed was an aircraft carrier.

Good software gets out of the way

Explore the art of invisible software and user-centric workflow design with Swizec and Kent C Dodds. Uncover what separates a good engineer from a great one in this insightful dialogue.

Relentlessly focus on the outcomes

AI makes it easy to focus inwards and feel impressed with all the churn and motion and output you're producing. But your users don't care.

Engineering levels aren't about skill anymore

Traditional engineering levels were about skill progression. I think this has changed. Everyone now is a mini staff engineer.

Just fix their PR

You know what's better than a code review comment? A fix.

"But if AI does it all, what's *my* job?"

On AI, mental load, and delegation

What you need to make an agent

I've been digging into agents for internal tooling and processes. Looking for how to scale without drowning in manual work. Here's what I found

Quick note on evals and putting AI in your resume

When candidates put AI on their resume, the key thing I try to find out is whether they used evals. How did you measure making improvements?

AI now writes 97% of my code. Here's what I learned

Forget the bullshit tips and tricks, just talk to it.

Just Read the Paper

Read more papers. You can learn the latest and greatest in your field in one chill afternoon.

Watch people work

We talk a lot about outcomes over outputs and how engineers are supposed to get us over the water, not blindly build a bridge because someone asked for a bridge. But how do you do that in practice?

Frustration Driven Development

Frustration is your greatest engineering asset. What do you do the 5th time someone asks for the same damn thing yet again?

Software engineer interviews for the age of AI

Maybe AI will replace engineers, I don't know. Self-driving cars were just around the corner for 50 years. Until then we've got shit to do and engineers to hire.

The best engineers just get shit done, sometimes with AI

The best engineers I know never talk about their AI setup. The worst engineers I know only talk about their AI setup.

Taming chaos is a learnable skill

How you approach software engineering makes it harder or easier to handle interruptions and other chaos. Writing a behavioral interview made me realize this is a learnable skill!

Put scope on your resume

Your resume titles don't matter. Just tell me what did you do.

Probably the realest thing I ever wrote

Users buy your service, not your code

You might enjoy this podcast episode. Sylvain and I talked about owning production in a world where AI writes the code.

GeLLMan amnesia

AI will automate every job except the ones I'm deeply familiar with

The 3 curves that make a scalable business

You want users and revenue to grow exponentially. Bugs per day to grow linearly. Support work to grow logarithmically. Your goal is to make this happen.

In praise of the stacked pull request

How fast you do code review is how fast you do everything. Your PR queue is the leading indicator of team velocity. Stacked PRs can help.

How you migrate is everything

Your code becomes legacy software when it works. You build something to solve a problem, then the problem changes. Or best practices evolve. Or you hire team members with more experience. Or the world changes. Or you have more people touching the same code and your beautiful architectural vision didn't translate.

The future of software engineering is SRE

When code gets cheap operational excellence wins. Anyone can build a greenfield demo, but it takes engineering to run a service.

A tough job market is the best time to start something

Here's how to navigate a tough job market from someone dumb enough to have done it before. Me.

Place good startup bets

You can't win every bet. Your goal is to be a little more right than wrong and keep playing