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.
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.
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.
15 March 2025
tl;dr Over the last two years, we've seen a dramatic policy debate playing out on the feeds of LinkedIn: "WFH (Work From Home) vs RTO (Return to Office)". Nearly everyone has an opinion, and many (if not most) of them are held strongly. Some are held based on data, some on personal preference, and many are based on personal experience. Nearly all of them, however, focus on the wrong part of the debate: it's not really about "WFH vs RTO", but about "async vs sync".
13 March 2025
tl;dr Ever had one of those situations where you find that some data about your engagement with a company or institution is incorrect, go through the motions to correct it, only to discover it has mysteriously changed back to the original, incorrect, value? The other day I was driving with my wife back from some doctor's appointments and we were talking about some social media friends she has that were complaining about the same. It's the modern take on "tilting at windmills", yet it's so common we just accept it as an everyday part of modern life. It got me thinking about the problem from a software perspective, rather than a human or corporate perspective. And I think we, software developers, are partly to blame for the situation. Incorrect data, it seems, is impossible to correct in any system larger than a single database.
09 March 2025
tl;dr A colleague of mine, Scott Porad (CTO, VP Engineering) posted on LinkedIn, asking, "What are all the other kinds of debt like tech debt?" He listed out a few, then asked for others to weigh in, and the list grew... kinda long. And interesting. And made me think about the metaphor more deeply.
Older posts are available in the archive.