28 April 2026
More than a quarter-century ago, a software development tool was quite popular and useful in building applications that could be developed, released, sold, and maintained, all by a single person. I speak, of course, of FoxPro (later Visual FoxPro after it was acquired by Microsoft), but the same could be said equally of Visual Basic (v3 through v6) or PowerBuilder or any of a dozen other "4GL" kinds of tools. Today's "coding agents" potentially deliver unto us a similar kind of capability.
08 April 2026
LinkedIn has been awash in layoff stories for, God, it feels like forever now. But a recent post got me thinking about layoffs, and how some of our reactions are deeply visceral when others get laid off around us, and why it's such a deeply personal thing to be suddenly unemployed.
01 April 2026
While spending some time inside the company Slack, I mentioned that I wanted to try a particular tool but using locally-hosted LLMs rather than cloud-hosted ones. The response was basically "LULZ y would u want to do that" and not only was I a little surprised at the response, I realized I felt a strong desire to explain why, in a format more suited to a blog post than a Slack message.
31 March 2026
It's been suggested that, as a natural consequence of the coding agent evolution, as coding agent adoption rises, the amount of time developers will spend working directly with code will either quickly or slowly approach zero. Despite some reasonable analogies that would suggest it, I don't agree, because of the nature of how LLMs work and what we expect out of code.
31 March 2026
You know how the startup community loves to talk about "disrupting" industries? Well, thanks to the general magic of large language models, combined with the capitalist drive of huge VC-backed companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, we find ourselves not imposing one, but having one imposed on us. And I'm pretty sure, we don't like it.
01 January 2026
It's that time of the year again, when I make predictions for the upcoming year. As has become my tradition now for almost two decades, I will first go back over last years' predictions, to see how well I called it (and keep me honest), then wax prophetic on what I think the new year has to offer us.
11 October 2025
tl;dr Two years ago, I started creating a pattern language for developer relations activities, and I published an early draft of what they looked like to this website. In the time since, they've been refined, expanded, and collected into a single paper volume, available from APress in December of 2025.
11 October 2025
tl;dr Linguis, available for examination and/or forking, is a language designed to explore the axis of, "How much can we tweak the front-end of the language, in this case the parser, so that people of different nationalities can write code in the syntax of their choice?" Available at https://github.com/tedneward/Linguis for perusal, though it's only at a 0.1 now.
11 August 2025
As a software developer in 2025, it is difficult to choose how to spend one's time. New programming languages (Rust, Zig, AssemblyScript, ...), new data storage implementations (NoSQL, NewSQL, multimodel databases, ...), and of course the alluring temptation of "artificial intelligence", all beckon for the developer's time and attention. More importantly, in a world where ChatGPT can toss off an essay on any topic imaginable without requiring any work on your part, why would any intelligent software developer spend a moment's effort on writing prose?
23 May 2025
No Starch Press sent me a copy of Sy Brand's "Building A Debugger", which walks, step by step, through the process of building your own assembly-level, native-executable debugger. It geeks me out in ways I haven't geeked out since... well, since the last low-level geekery book (the ARM assembly book) they sent me.
Older posts are available in the archive.