Another round of links — with a slightly smaller gap (90 days on the dot!) between dumps collations.

Software Engineering

• Software needs to evolve. You can’t just evolve it in specific, dedicated rewrites or ‘foundation’ milestones. You should leverage feature work to evolve your foundations & infrastructure. The Mechanics of Software Evolution
• ”No Bugs” is a quality approach that comes up in cycles. I’ve seen it at the industry level, and on specific teams. Similar trope, repeated on a cycle. While not the first, I thought this memo from Microsoft in 1989 titled “Zero Defects” was surprisingly pragmatic (albeit with a bit of brogrammer in there). Zero Defects
• Developer productivity is near and dear to my heart. It gets talked about, but sometimes you need to take a step back from the measurable ‘better compile times’. This article is a nice revisit as to why it’s more important than ‘just work quicker’. A dev’s thoughts on developer productivity
• C++ is powerful. It’s also an ecosystem inhabited by pedants, in-groups, and complexity junkies. I thought this was a nice reflection on the dumbassery that often appears in those group (and I say this as someone who really quite likes C++ when used sensibly). Scholars of Trivia
• In every UI platform I’ve worked in, I feel I’ve easily grasped the different layout options, and how to abuse them for good. For some reason I’ve never quite had the same intuition for the web. This article really helped let me revisit that. Understanding Layout Algorithms
• RFC/Spec/Guidance/Something for ‘Virtual Threads’ in the JVM. Pretty baller! Reminds me a lot of fibers in Windows. JEP 425: Virtual Threads (Preview)
• Rust seems fancy, but suffers from the reality that no-one has made a UI stack in it that feels viable, or modern, or not some abstraction over all other platforms. While the architecture detailed in this article doesn’t solve that, it does feel like an attempt to bring something concrete in that space. Xilem: an architecture for UI in Rust

Leadership / Management / Career

• Getting organisations to invest in ‘platform’ or ‘infrastructure’ teams is difficult. It’s even more difficult in situations where it doesn’t appear there is shared infra — aka just a mobile or desktop app. I spent six years running a team that built shared app infrastructure — before that I spent four years being the person building it. Trunk and Branches Model for Scaling Infrastructure Organisations hit a sweet spot covering this topic. I especially appreciated the discussion on lending members out to help teams bootstrap.
• Talk to your peer teams. We’re all going to the same place. Don’t keep “secrets”. Effective Teams Don’t Keep Secrets
• Throughout my career I’ve seen many reach what I sometimes call a ‘local maxima’. They’re brilliant at what they do, and can’t move past that to unlock more. Sure, sometimes it’s because they at a global maxima. But often I see them get surpassed by their peers. Often there is a strong whiff of arrogance. This pair of articles tell a better story than I can, and provide a great framework to more concrete aspects of what this really means. (ngl, I fear I’m stuck at a local maxima). How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner + How Software Groups Rot: Legacy of the Expert Beginning

Technology

• Looks like Apple did a bang up job on Apple Silicon: Introduction to Apple Silicon
• Really interesting research / paper talking about using drug discovery ML to develop adversarial drugs. Aka bloody terrifying. Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery
• Online communities have a significant amount of context — ok, so do real-world communities — and when you cross the streams, it all goes a bit Pete Tong. What’s ‘Context Collapse’? Understanding it Can Mean a More Fulfilling Online Life
• Related to context collapse is more private walled gardens. People are migrating some of their online conversations behind privacy screens. The continuing rise of virtual private neighbourhoods

Random

• What does long term really mean? This article really makes you feel small and insignificant. The Future Will Have To Wait
• Part of me is deeply terrified of being old, for many reasons. This article really struck me deep. On Aging Alone