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Few people care more about software performance than Casey Muratori. Give him a few minutes of your attention with this episode, and he'll convince you to learn to read Assembly (no, really, I finally started to read it, it's really not that scary, esp with an AI that can... help explain the sequences). Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 05:17 Games at Microsoft 12:52 Building games 16:00 Why performance matters 27:12 Why you should learn to read assembly 30:36 Designing for optimization 42:51 How to get better at writing performant software 49:04 Understanding how the CPU works 55:53 Building games then and now 1:05:56 How game engines changed building games 1:10:48 Why new games compete with old games 1:13:25 GTA 6: why is it taking so long? 1:16:59 Casey's critique of clean code 1:21:48 Casey's take on TDD 1:24:30 What is good code? 1:27:32 What makes a good software engineer? 1:33:56 Why Casey doesn't code with AI 1:39:01 AI's impact on the game industry 1:44:43 AI and burnout 1:50:21 Why you should read papers Brought to you by: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages • Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable Three interesting things we talked about: 1. Is performance starting to matter to businesses? Enterprise software buyers care mainly about cost, compliance, and capabilities – but not performance. Even so, there are some products gaining major popularity and market share due to their performance, such as File Pilot (next-gen file explorer) and the Blick video editor. Is the tide turning? 2. Profiler-driven performance optimization is the wrong way to optimize The standard way of optimizing is to profile the application, tweak hotspots, then check if the stats have improved. But this only finds a local minimum; Casey says every engineer he’s worked with who was a great “optimizer” began by establishing what the hardware could theoretically do, and then did not stop until they’d closed the gap to that performance level. 3. Take a grain of salt with conventional wisdom that premature optimization is the “root of all evil” Many devs use it as an excuse to delay performance optimization, but Casey says that not optimizing in time could mean that only performance hotspots can be fixed later, and not the architectural issues that create poor performance. Architect your system to be performant, or you’ll have trouble solving problems without a rewrite!show more

Gergely Orosz

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In 2025, it was rational to be skeptical about whether AI would change the future of software development. In 2026, it's not, anymore. With Charity Majors: Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:56 How Parse led to Honeycomb 06:00 The limits of individual productivity metrics 09:08 How Charity’s perspective on AI has evolved 13:50 Rewriting code vs. editing code 19:20 Production as a stage of development 22:14 Code reviews 26:56 Non-deterministic systems 31:11 Sensible uses of AI 37:41 The two AI camps 44:40 Why AI works so well for building software 49:42 DevOps 55:13 Modern observability 1:00:40 Handling context overload 1:01:56 What’s new in Observability Engineering’s 2nd edition 1:07:45 What effective leadership looks like 1:10:25 Engineering management: what is changing? 1:16:31 Junior engineers 1:18:01 AI fatigue 1:21:39 Book recommendations Brought to you by: • Antithesis — turbocharge testing of your systems by running your whole system under aggressive fault injection. Teams like Jane Street, and the etcd community rely on Antithesis. • Buildkite — the CI platform trusted by OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Meta, Uber, NVIDIA, Airbnb and many more. Engineered to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue. • WorkOS — make your app and agents Enterprise Ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more. 1. The question engineers need to answer: what would it take for you to be fully comfortable shipping code you have not read? Charity believes it is a “when” and not an “if” that professional software engineers will ship code they never looked at – and thus do not understand – to production. Engineering is building the systems that validate this code, and allow shipping with full confidence. 2. AI could have the software industry go through the “pets” to “cattle” change that compute infra went through in the 2010s. Up to now, writing software from scratch was far more expensive than editing existing software. But now, generating hundreds of variants of a function can be done faster than how long it would take you to hand-write it once. Charity believes that we might be at the beginning of the transition from “pets” to “cattle” that happened at the hardware infrastructure layer. Before the 2010s, configuring and repairing individual servers was commonly done. But with tools like Terraform and Kubernetes, individual servers having issues are no longer fixed up: they are re-created instead. Charity thinks the same might happen with code, sooner rather than later. When there’s an issue with the code, generate new code that solves it, and is verifyably correct. 3. Non-deterministic systems require more engineering discipline versus before. With code written by AI, we’re reducing the trust in the code (because we no longer wrote it), so we need to increase trust at the other part of the development process. Specifically, at validation: with things like tests, evals, and conformance testing.

In 2025, it was rational to be skeptical about whether AI would change the future of software development. In 2026, it's not, anymore. With Charity Majors: Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:56 How Parse led to Honeycomb 06:00 The limits of individual productivity metrics 09:08 How Charity’s perspective on AI has evolved 13:50 Rewriting code vs. editing code 19:20 Production as a stage of development 22:14 Code reviews 26:56 Non-deterministic systems 31:11 Sensible uses of AI 37:41 The two AI camps 44:40 Why AI works so well for building software 49:42 DevOps 55:13 Modern observability 1:00:40 Handling context overload 1:01:56 What’s new in Observability Engineering’s 2nd edition 1:07:45 What effective leadership looks like 1:10:25 Engineering management: what is changing? 1:16:31 Junior engineers 1:18:01 AI fatigue 1:21:39 Book recommendations Brought to you by: • Antithesis — turbocharge testing of your systems by running your whole system under aggressive fault injection. Teams like Jane Street, and the etcd community rely on Antithesis. • Buildkite — the CI platform trusted by OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Meta, Uber, NVIDIA, Airbnb and many more. Engineered to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue. • WorkOS — make your app and agents Enterprise Ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more. 1. The question engineers need to answer: what would it take for you to be fully comfortable shipping code you have not read? Charity believes it is a “when” and not an “if” that professional software engineers will ship code they never looked at – and thus do not understand – to production. Engineering is building the systems that validate this code, and allow shipping with full confidence. 2. AI could have the software industry go through the “pets” to “cattle” change that compute infra went through in the 2010s. Up to now, writing software from scratch was far more expensive than editing existing software. But now, generating hundreds of variants of a function can be done faster than how long it would take you to hand-write it once. Charity believes that we might be at the beginning of the transition from “pets” to “cattle” that happened at the hardware infrastructure layer. Before the 2010s, configuring and repairing individual servers was commonly done. But with tools like Terraform and Kubernetes, individual servers having issues are no longer fixed up: they are re-created instead. Charity thinks the same might happen with code, sooner rather than later. When there’s an issue with the code, generate new code that solves it, and is verifyably correct. 3. Non-deterministic systems require more engineering discipline versus before. With code written by AI, we’re reducing the trust in the code (because we no longer wrote it), so we need to increase trust at the other part of the development process. Specifically, at validation: with things like tests, evals, and conformance testing.

Gergely Orosz

30,495 views • 18 days ago

Anders Hejlsberg (Anders Hejlsberg) is a living legend: he created Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and TypeScript (and today TypeScript is the most-used programming language, globally, as per GitHub.) Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:48 How Anders got into programming 05:40 Building his first compiler 07:44 Turbo Pascal 12:25 Delphi 14:53 Joining Microsoft 19:41 Building C# 29:11 Async/await 34:01 The rise of JavaScript 37:52 Building TypeScript 42:58 How the TypeScript compiler works 48:30 JavaScript’s strengths and weaknesses 52:18 How Anders uses AI 56:03 What language features work well with AI 1:02:49 How software craftsmanship is changing 1:07:49 Performance and efficiency 1:09:29 Anders’ tool stack 1:11:30 A 30-year career at Microsoft 1:13:40 Book recommendation Brought to you by: Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. Four things that stood out to me: 1. “10x better for 1/10th of the price” is a proven winner. This is what Turbo Pascal did: it sold for $49.95 when competing compilers cost $500, and it was faster and more interactive than competitors’ products. Conveniently, the low price tag also killed off piracy 2. C# might have not existed without a famous court case. Microsoft originally hired Anders to architect its Java tools (Visual J++), but the Sun versus Microsoft lawsuit (1997-2001) meant Microsoft could not build on top of Java, as the company that owned Java’s IP (Sun) sued MS for alleged unauthorized changes to the Java language. Microsoft realized it had to build a new language that combined VB’s productivity with C++’s power. This led to C# and .NET. 3. TypeScript exists because Anders refused to build Script# for the Outlook .com team. Microsoft’s Outlook .com team asked Anders’ C# team to productize “ScriptSharp,” a language to cross-compile C# to JavaScript. Anders and the C# team pushed back, suggesting that a better approach was to fix JavaScript. Anders felt strongly that to be attractive to the best-of-breed developers in the JavaScript ecosystem, you want people to write JavaScript, and not another language like C#. 4. Designing a programming language is a 10-year play. As Anders puts it: “Version one is great, but has all sorts of issues. You’ve got to do version two, but it’s not until version three that it really starts to be great. Then you’ve got to convince people to adopt it.”

Anders Hejlsberg (Anders Hejlsberg) is a living legend: he created Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and TypeScript (and today TypeScript is the most-used programming language, globally, as per GitHub.) Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:48 How Anders got into programming 05:40 Building his first compiler 07:44 Turbo Pascal 12:25 Delphi 14:53 Joining Microsoft 19:41 Building C# 29:11 Async/await 34:01 The rise of JavaScript 37:52 Building TypeScript 42:58 How the TypeScript compiler works 48:30 JavaScript’s strengths and weaknesses 52:18 How Anders uses AI 56:03 What language features work well with AI 1:02:49 How software craftsmanship is changing 1:07:49 Performance and efficiency 1:09:29 Anders’ tool stack 1:11:30 A 30-year career at Microsoft 1:13:40 Book recommendation Brought to you by: Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. Four things that stood out to me: 1. “10x better for 1/10th of the price” is a proven winner. This is what Turbo Pascal did: it sold for $49.95 when competing compilers cost $500, and it was faster and more interactive than competitors’ products. Conveniently, the low price tag also killed off piracy 2. C# might have not existed without a famous court case. Microsoft originally hired Anders to architect its Java tools (Visual J++), but the Sun versus Microsoft lawsuit (1997-2001) meant Microsoft could not build on top of Java, as the company that owned Java’s IP (Sun) sued MS for alleged unauthorized changes to the Java language. Microsoft realized it had to build a new language that combined VB’s productivity with C++’s power. This led to C# and .NET. 3. TypeScript exists because Anders refused to build Script# for the Outlook .com team. Microsoft’s Outlook .com team asked Anders’ C# team to productize “ScriptSharp,” a language to cross-compile C# to JavaScript. Anders and the C# team pushed back, suggesting that a better approach was to fix JavaScript. Anders felt strongly that to be attractive to the best-of-breed developers in the JavaScript ecosystem, you want people to write JavaScript, and not another language like C#. 4. Designing a programming language is a 10-year play. As Anders puts it: “Version one is great, but has all sorts of issues. You’ve got to do version two, but it’s not until version three that it really starts to be great. Then you’ve got to convince people to adopt it.”

Gergely Orosz

129,539 views • 3 months ago

Why is the creator of OpenCode pretty skeptical about AI productivity gains, and the hype around AI? A very conversation dax (and lots of truth bombs:) Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 07:03 Dax’s path into tech 09:04 Early startup experience 13:16 Getting involved with open source 16:13 OpenCode 23:17 Anthropic banning OpenCode 30:34 From terminal to GUI 32:34 OpenCode’s business model 36:33 Why inference is profitable 39:11 GPU bottlenecks 40:54 AI hype 45:50 AI spending 48:47 Dax’s memo 55:41 Dax’s skepticism of predictions 58:58 Engineering culture at OpenCode 1:02:38 How building works at OpenCode 1:05:36 Taste and quality 1:11:32 Dax’s work setup 1:12:35 The role of engineers and EMs 1:15:50 Advice for engineers 1:18:12 Book recommendation Brought to you by: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable Three interesting thoughts from Dax: 1. No AI-native coding agent company is “winning” by being better with AI. Dax says that none of OpenCode’s competitors are crushing them, and that nobody is using AI so well that others cannot compete. 2. Most software engineers profit from AI as time gained, not increased output — unless you change incentives! Dax says the natural way for software engineers to “cash out” their AI tooling gains is with time savings, by doing the same work as before, but faster. Until compensation and motivation structures change, most teams should expect output to stay flat while engineers go home earlier. There’s nothing wrong with this, but AI vendors sell a different outcome to CFOs: increased output. 3. AI code generation mutes the “guilt” of doing the wrong thing, but this builds up tech debt. Pre-AI, writing a hack felt bad, the second time it felt really bad, and by the third time you’d often just refactor in order to fix up the code. Now, the agent hides the hack, which skews devs’ judgment and results in less tech debt being cleaned up.

Why is the creator of OpenCode pretty skeptical about AI productivity gains, and the hype around AI? A very conversation dax (and lots of truth bombs:) Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 07:03 Dax’s path into tech 09:04 Early startup experience 13:16 Getting involved with open source 16:13 OpenCode 23:17 Anthropic banning OpenCode 30:34 From terminal to GUI 32:34 OpenCode’s business model 36:33 Why inference is profitable 39:11 GPU bottlenecks 40:54 AI hype 45:50 AI spending 48:47 Dax’s memo 55:41 Dax’s skepticism of predictions 58:58 Engineering culture at OpenCode 1:02:38 How building works at OpenCode 1:05:36 Taste and quality 1:11:32 Dax’s work setup 1:12:35 The role of engineers and EMs 1:15:50 Advice for engineers 1:18:12 Book recommendation Brought to you by: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable Three interesting thoughts from Dax: 1. No AI-native coding agent company is “winning” by being better with AI. Dax says that none of OpenCode’s competitors are crushing them, and that nobody is using AI so well that others cannot compete. 2. Most software engineers profit from AI as time gained, not increased output — unless you change incentives! Dax says the natural way for software engineers to “cash out” their AI tooling gains is with time savings, by doing the same work as before, but faster. Until compensation and motivation structures change, most teams should expect output to stay flat while engineers go home earlier. There’s nothing wrong with this, but AI vendors sell a different outcome to CFOs: increased output. 3. AI code generation mutes the “guilt” of doing the wrong thing, but this builds up tech debt. Pre-AI, writing a hack felt bad, the second time it felt really bad, and by the third time you’d often just refactor in order to fix up the code. Now, the agent hides the hack, which skews devs’ judgment and results in less tech debt being cleaned up.

Gergely Orosz

231,584 views • 3 months ago

There are few people who have impacted the software engineering industry like Kent Beck 🌻 has. He'd never before told his career story from start to today in one sitting - until now. What a treat. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 03:47 Human engineers aren’t going away 08:00 Kent's path into tech 13:50 Undergraduate and graduate studies 17:21 Kent’s first programming job 18:54 The rise and fall of Smalltalk 27:04 Working with Ward Cunningham 37:36 Design patterns 44:05 Working at Apple 51:08 CRC Cards 59:29 Testing tools in the language 1:04:22 The C3 project with Martin Fowler 1:09:54 Extreme Programming 1:16:25 Developing TDD 1:25:07 Writing the Agile Manifesto 1:30:00 Agile’s impact 1:32:40 Agile’s downside 1:37:32 The Dotcom Bust 1:44:30 Lessons from working at Facebook 1:59:44 Kent’s ‘Good to Great’ program at Facebook 2:06:07 Soft skills engineers need to learn 2:09:30 AI and the challenges of acceleration 2:15:53 Explore, expand, extract 2:22:33 What Kent is excited about Brought to you by: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready Kent shared so many previously untold stories - like how he was fired from Apple (!!), how he and Ward Cunningham used a thesaurus to find the right words, how the Agile Manifesto came together. My favorite reflection from is this though: The human part is the most important one in software engineering. As Kent explained: “This is the biggest cosmic, practical joke ever. As young people, we were promised: “Okay, here’s this computer and once you’ve completely understand this computer, you’ll be fine. That’s all you need to do.” So I set out the first part of my career just to become the best programmer that I could be because that’s what it would take to be successful. And then you realize: sorry, there’s this whole human side. Your ability to affect change in the world is gated by your ability to communicate with, to soothe, to understand other human beings. And those are exactly the skills that I thought I didn’t need to learn! So I was promised: just understand the computer and you’ll be successful. And then someone went “just kidding, understand people!” And now I was in a position of being ten years behind.”

There are few people who have impacted the software engineering industry like Kent Beck 🌻 has. He'd never before told his career story from start to today in one sitting - until now. What a treat. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 03:47 Human engineers aren’t going away 08:00 Kent's path into tech 13:50 Undergraduate and graduate studies 17:21 Kent’s first programming job 18:54 The rise and fall of Smalltalk 27:04 Working with Ward Cunningham 37:36 Design patterns 44:05 Working at Apple 51:08 CRC Cards 59:29 Testing tools in the language 1:04:22 The C3 project with Martin Fowler 1:09:54 Extreme Programming 1:16:25 Developing TDD 1:25:07 Writing the Agile Manifesto 1:30:00 Agile’s impact 1:32:40 Agile’s downside 1:37:32 The Dotcom Bust 1:44:30 Lessons from working at Facebook 1:59:44 Kent’s ‘Good to Great’ program at Facebook 2:06:07 Soft skills engineers need to learn 2:09:30 AI and the challenges of acceleration 2:15:53 Explore, expand, extract 2:22:33 What Kent is excited about Brought to you by: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready Kent shared so many previously untold stories - like how he was fired from Apple (!!), how he and Ward Cunningham used a thesaurus to find the right words, how the Agile Manifesto came together. My favorite reflection from is this though: The human part is the most important one in software engineering. As Kent explained: “This is the biggest cosmic, practical joke ever. As young people, we were promised: “Okay, here’s this computer and once you’ve completely understand this computer, you’ll be fine. That’s all you need to do.” So I set out the first part of my career just to become the best programmer that I could be because that’s what it would take to be successful. And then you realize: sorry, there’s this whole human side. Your ability to affect change in the world is gated by your ability to communicate with, to soothe, to understand other human beings. And those are exactly the skills that I thought I didn’t need to learn! So I was promised: just understand the computer and you’ll be successful. And then someone went “just kidding, understand people!” And now I was in a position of being ten years behind.”

Gergely Orosz

26,602 views • 2 months ago

If you’ve ever opened Chrome DevTools, or optimized a page for Core Web Vitals, you’ve used software built by Addy Osmani. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:50 Addy’s current workflow 05:11 Addy’s path into tech 15:04 Addy’s work on jQuery 16:44 TodoMVC 21:44 Getting hired at Google and working on Chrome 27:17 Building dev tools 40:15 Core Web Vitals 45:42 Google’s engineering culture 51:03 Addy’s career trajectory at Google 57:55 The director role at Google 1:01:40 Cognitive debt and cognitive surrender 1:03:03 Working with agents 1:05:52 Loop engineering 1:12:55 The changing role of the software engineer 1:18:15 How Addy uses AI in writing 1:27:40 What’s next for Addy 1:28:47 Career advice Brought to you by: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. Teams like Jane Street, and the etcd community use Antithesis to ship better code, faster. • Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers. • Google Cloud Run – run untrusted agent code without the security anxiety. Cloud Run sandboxes deliver hyper-isolated, ephemeral execution environments that spin up in milliseconds. Check them out: Here's Addy's advice on where he believes engineers should invest efforts, in the coming years, in his words: “What we are very likely to see happen next with engineering careers (as well as product and other roles) is the unbundling of them, so that an engineer also has product sense, while a product person also has engineering sense, or UX sense. You should think about the non-engineering things if you don’t [usually] have the time to think about product or technical evangelism, or go-to-market approaches, or any other parts of how businesses are successful. If you can show employers that you are not just a builder, but someone that can help them as roles start to become a little bit fuzzier, then I think that you can be successful in these times. Don’t be just an engineer.”

If you’ve ever opened Chrome DevTools, or optimized a page for Core Web Vitals, you’ve used software built by Addy Osmani. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:50 Addy’s current workflow 05:11 Addy’s path into tech 15:04 Addy’s work on jQuery 16:44 TodoMVC 21:44 Getting hired at Google and working on Chrome 27:17 Building dev tools 40:15 Core Web Vitals 45:42 Google’s engineering culture 51:03 Addy’s career trajectory at Google 57:55 The director role at Google 1:01:40 Cognitive debt and cognitive surrender 1:03:03 Working with agents 1:05:52 Loop engineering 1:12:55 The changing role of the software engineer 1:18:15 How Addy uses AI in writing 1:27:40 What’s next for Addy 1:28:47 Career advice Brought to you by: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. Teams like Jane Street, and the etcd community use Antithesis to ship better code, faster. • Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers. • Google Cloud Run – run untrusted agent code without the security anxiety. Cloud Run sandboxes deliver hyper-isolated, ephemeral execution environments that spin up in milliseconds. Check them out: Here's Addy's advice on where he believes engineers should invest efforts, in the coming years, in his words: “What we are very likely to see happen next with engineering careers (as well as product and other roles) is the unbundling of them, so that an engineer also has product sense, while a product person also has engineering sense, or UX sense. You should think about the non-engineering things if you don’t [usually] have the time to think about product or technical evangelism, or go-to-market approaches, or any other parts of how businesses are successful. If you can show employers that you are not just a builder, but someone that can help them as roles start to become a little bit fuzzier, then I think that you can be successful in these times. Don’t be just an engineer.”

Gergely Orosz

396,505 views • 12 days ago

There’s a popular theory that AI will finally make formal verification mainstream because mathematical proof of correctness will be needed when machines write most or all of the code. But will this happen? Hillel Wayne is one of the best people to answer. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 04:32 The Crossover Project 11:37 What software engineering does better 15:30 What traditional engineering does better 18:17 Formal methods 29:32 TLA+: what it is and demo 36:58 TLA+ at Amazon 38:10 Ways distributed systems break 41:03 Formal methods and systems thinking 46:20 The value of learning math 50:23 What TLA+ is good for and isn’t 52:50 Alloy: a declarative language for software modeling 58:53 Other formal methods tools 1:01:24 Property-based testing 1:05:31 AI and the need for formal verification 1:12:29 Logic for programmers 1:14:35 Hillel’s 2025 prediction on AI’s impact 1:21:30 Book recommendation Brought to you by: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. Two things I found especially interesting, talking with Hillel: 1. Amazon used TLA+ to find a bug almost impossible to locate without formal methods. In the paper How AWS uses formal methods, the AWS team shared that they’d found a complicated bug for which the shortest error trace to exhibit was 35 steps (!!). The bug passed unnoticed through extensive design review, code reviews, and testing. AWS concluded they wouldn’t have uncovered it if they’d stuck to conventional testing approaches. 2. Why not use formal verification for everything, then? It’s because specs in the real world are a nightmare to write. Even a simple problem like “find the file in a directory that has the most lines” gets complicated when modeled with formal methods. We would have to answer questions like: ‘do we look at ASCII or UTF-8 new line characters, what about unreadable files, and Symlinks?’ Without formal methods, we can write a simple verification that is right in 99%+ of cases. Formal methods require a lot of extra effort for the less than 1% of exotic use cases!

There’s a popular theory that AI will finally make formal verification mainstream because mathematical proof of correctness will be needed when machines write most or all of the code. But will this happen? Hillel Wayne is one of the best people to answer. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 04:32 The Crossover Project 11:37 What software engineering does better 15:30 What traditional engineering does better 18:17 Formal methods 29:32 TLA+: what it is and demo 36:58 TLA+ at Amazon 38:10 Ways distributed systems break 41:03 Formal methods and systems thinking 46:20 The value of learning math 50:23 What TLA+ is good for and isn’t 52:50 Alloy: a declarative language for software modeling 58:53 Other formal methods tools 1:01:24 Property-based testing 1:05:31 AI and the need for formal verification 1:12:29 Logic for programmers 1:14:35 Hillel’s 2025 prediction on AI’s impact 1:21:30 Book recommendation Brought to you by: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. Two things I found especially interesting, talking with Hillel: 1. Amazon used TLA+ to find a bug almost impossible to locate without formal methods. In the paper How AWS uses formal methods, the AWS team shared that they’d found a complicated bug for which the shortest error trace to exhibit was 35 steps (!!). The bug passed unnoticed through extensive design review, code reviews, and testing. AWS concluded they wouldn’t have uncovered it if they’d stuck to conventional testing approaches. 2. Why not use formal verification for everything, then? It’s because specs in the real world are a nightmare to write. Even a simple problem like “find the file in a directory that has the most lines” gets complicated when modeled with formal methods. We would have to answer questions like: ‘do we look at ASCII or UTF-8 new line characters, what about unreadable files, and Symlinks?’ Without formal methods, we can write a simple verification that is right in 99%+ of cases. Formal methods require a lot of extra effort for the less than 1% of exotic use cases!

Gergely Orosz

34,525 views • 1 month ago

I sat down with Nicolas Sharp, founder of Attio, to talk in depth about how his company is disrupting the $80 billion CRM market. Attio has raised $116m, is 4x'ing ARR and is one of the fastest growing companies in Europe. We talk about: - Why Attio went against all conventional wisdom and spent years 3 years building the product before launching - Why Attio doesn’t hire ‘Software Engineers’ and who they hire instead. - How Attio chose investors who would back a long-term bet against multi-billion $ incumbents - How Attio is building CRM from first principles for the AI era - Who should you avoid hiring at all costs, and who should you hire for your startup And so much more. If you’re interested in learning about the story of how Nick built Attio into the incredible company it is today and is disrupting one of the most important software categories, you’re going to want to see this. Enjoy // Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:39 Why Attio spent 3 years building their product before launch 5:05 The Power of Building Systems, Not a Box of Features 9:05 How to know when it’s time to launch 13:30 Nick’s Playbook For a Killer Product Launch 18:09 How To Go From an Investor to a Founder 23:05 How Failure Led to Attio's Big Break 28:07 Why startups need to hire "Hidden Gems," 34:05 Fundraising 49:36 Why Attio Invests In Inexperienced Talent 55:07 The Case For Not Hiring Software Engineers (& Who You Should Hire Instead) 1:02:46 The 8 Persona Hiring Framework 1:09:05 How Attio doesn’t use OKR's 1:27:11 Where does Nick's Ambition and Grit come from? 1:36:59 How Attio is Building CRM from First Principles for the AI era 1:45:29 How to Successfully Market In A Crowded Industry 1:51:10 Breaking Down Attio’s Viral Marketing Strategies 2:02:15 The Change That Had The Biggest Impact on Customer Conversion 2:05:04 Why Attio created A “Reverse Trial” 2:10:16 Why Nick is building from London, not Silicon Valley 2:22:48 The 10-Year Vision for Attio

I sat down with Nicolas Sharp, founder of Attio, to talk in depth about how his company is disrupting the $80 billion CRM market. Attio has raised $116m, is 4x'ing ARR and is one of the fastest growing companies in Europe. We talk about: - Why Attio went against all conventional wisdom and spent years 3 years building the product before launching - Why Attio doesn’t hire ‘Software Engineers’ and who they hire instead. - How Attio chose investors who would back a long-term bet against multi-billion $ incumbents - How Attio is building CRM from first principles for the AI era - Who should you avoid hiring at all costs, and who should you hire for your startup And so much more. If you’re interested in learning about the story of how Nick built Attio into the incredible company it is today and is disrupting one of the most important software categories, you’re going to want to see this. Enjoy // Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:39 Why Attio spent 3 years building their product before launch 5:05 The Power of Building Systems, Not a Box of Features 9:05 How to know when it’s time to launch 13:30 Nick’s Playbook For a Killer Product Launch 18:09 How To Go From an Investor to a Founder 23:05 How Failure Led to Attio's Big Break 28:07 Why startups need to hire "Hidden Gems," 34:05 Fundraising 49:36 Why Attio Invests In Inexperienced Talent 55:07 The Case For Not Hiring Software Engineers (& Who You Should Hire Instead) 1:02:46 The 8 Persona Hiring Framework 1:09:05 How Attio doesn’t use OKR's 1:27:11 Where does Nick's Ambition and Grit come from? 1:36:59 How Attio is Building CRM from First Principles for the AI era 1:45:29 How to Successfully Market In A Crowded Industry 1:51:10 Breaking Down Attio’s Viral Marketing Strategies 2:02:15 The Change That Had The Biggest Impact on Customer Conversion 2:05:04 Why Attio created A “Reverse Trial” 2:10:16 Why Nick is building from London, not Silicon Valley 2:22:48 The 10-Year Vision for Attio

Wouter Teunissen

26,369 views • 11 months ago

I have been wanting to test performance transfer in Seadance 2.5 since launch, now I have, I am really impressed by the results. I wrote a short script and recorded myself giving a rallying speech as an orc warlord, then fed this and an image of the orc into Seedance with this prompt "A cinematic close up of an orc warlord giving a rallying speech to his army of orcs. Transfer the performance, movement and audio from Video 1 onto the the character Image 1. Do not add any music" I didn't prompt the dialogue or performance in text. The first video you see is a a final cut of the video, the second is the final cut of the video with my video performance. As you can see it's not an exact like-for-like transfer of the performance and voice but more a interpretation by Seedance. It's made my amateur performance better IMHO, more fitting with the creator but retain the essence, nuance and context. So you don't have to feed in a long prompt to get good performance out of your AI actors you can just show them what you want with a video! I used Seedance Enterprise on bytedances lumina platform Lumina link in the comments!

I have been wanting to test performance transfer in Seadance 2.5 since launch, now I have, I am really impressed by the results. I wrote a short script and recorded myself giving a rallying speech as an orc warlord, then fed this and an image of the orc into Seedance with this prompt "A cinematic close up of an orc warlord giving a rallying speech to his army of orcs. Transfer the performance, movement and audio from Video 1 onto the the character Image 1. Do not add any music" I didn't prompt the dialogue or performance in text. The first video you see is a a final cut of the video, the second is the final cut of the video with my video performance. As you can see it's not an exact like-for-like transfer of the performance and voice but more a interpretation by Seedance. It's made my amateur performance better IMHO, more fitting with the creator but retain the essence, nuance and context. So you don't have to feed in a long prompt to get good performance out of your AI actors you can just show them what you want with a video! I used Seedance Enterprise on bytedances lumina platform Lumina link in the comments!

Uncanny Harry AI

23,012 views • 19 days ago

📢 PERORMANCE V4 IS LIVE We've spent over 10 years at the Top of Performance Improvement companies, earning our place as the world’s #1 E-Sports PC Optimization Specialists. From elite players to top-tier orgs and hardware giants, our mission has always been clear: unlock every ounce of power your PC holds. Today, that mission reaches everyone. Whether you're a competitive gamer or managing high-level operations, tuned performance and low system latency matters. That’s why we’re proud to unveil Performance V4: a completely free utility app crafted and designed by my team and I as the first glimpse into increasing PC Performance for entirely free. Performance V4 is the beginning stages of the upcoming Paragon Tweak Utility (PTU): a revolutionary full-suite optimization platform, soon available through our website, and eventually to the Epic Games Store and Microsoft Store. Our current business strategy has two massive scale issues— the human resources required to optimize each customer's PC, and time to execution with appointment setting & correspondence. We believe that the next step is to create software that replaces that work, and in turn makes PC optimizations more accessible and more common for all, which is why we are launching on Believe. With more access to expendable cash, we can create our vision faster. The Performance V4 is LIVE , alongside an exclusive first look at PTU later next week. If you want to believe in something, believe in us 🫡

📢 PERORMANCE V4 IS LIVE We've spent over 10 years at the Top of Performance Improvement companies, earning our place as the world’s #1 E-Sports PC Optimization Specialists. From elite players to top-tier orgs and hardware giants, our mission has always been clear: unlock every ounce of power your PC holds. Today, that mission reaches everyone. Whether you're a competitive gamer or managing high-level operations, tuned performance and low system latency matters. That’s why we’re proud to unveil Performance V4: a completely free utility app crafted and designed by my team and I as the first glimpse into increasing PC Performance for entirely free. Performance V4 is the beginning stages of the upcoming Paragon Tweak Utility (PTU): a revolutionary full-suite optimization platform, soon available through our website, and eventually to the Epic Games Store and Microsoft Store. Our current business strategy has two massive scale issues— the human resources required to optimize each customer's PC, and time to execution with appointment setting & correspondence. We believe that the next step is to create software that replaces that work, and in turn makes PC optimizations more accessible and more common for all, which is why we are launching on Believe. With more access to expendable cash, we can create our vision faster. The Performance V4 is LIVE , alongside an exclusive first look at PTU later next week. If you want to believe in something, believe in us 🫡

Paragon│Boost Gaming PC Performance

55,054 views • 1 year ago

It's always energizing to do a podcast with Steve Yegge (Steve Yegge, engineer+author, formerly at Amazon+Google, creator of Gas Town). Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:43 Steve’s latest projects 02:27 Important blog posts 04:48 Shifts in what engineers need to know 10:46 Steve’s current AI stance 13:23 Steve’s book Vibe Coding 18:25 Layoffs and disruption in tech 31:13 Gas Town 40:10 New ways of working 51:08 The problem of too many people 54:45 Why AI results lag in business 59:57 Gamification and product stickiness 1:04:54 The ‘Bitter Lesson’ explained 1:07:14 The future of software development 1:23:06 Where languages stand 1:24:47 Adapting to change 1:27:32 Steve’s predictions Brought to you by: • Statsig – ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review. • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. Three interesting thoughts from Steve that we talked about in this conversation: 1. Reading ability is becoming a blocker for wider AI adoption. Some struggle with walls of text that current AI tools produce, and Steve predicts that in the very near future, most people will program by talking to a visual avatar, not reading terminal output because he observes that five paragraphs is already a lot to read for many devs. 2. What software engineers need to know keeps changing. In the 1990s, any decent software engineer knew Assembly, and today almost no decent developer knows it because Assembly has long been superseded by technical progress. What engineers “need” to know these days is different from the ‘90s and that process continues with AI, changing the parts of the craft that are essential for devs. We grumble about this but that won’t change anything by itself. 3. There’s a “Dracula Effect” where AI-augmented work drains engineers faster than traditional work. This is because AI automates the easy tasks, meaning that engineers are stuck doing high-intensity thinking all day. Steve says you may only get three daily productive hours at max speed, but during that time, you could produce 100x more output than before.

Gergely Orosz

41,987 views • 5 months ago

Benedict Evans says AI means more software, not less: "There's going to be a bunch of stuff you could do with software that you just couldn't do before at all. And so there will be more competition." "If you think about the enterprise software fleet today, you've got three buckets... big iron horizontal systems, so SAP and Workday and your CRM... vertical software... and then in the middle, this fuzzy improvised space of Excel and email and the shared file system." "Now you add ChatGPT to that. Do you do that in an LLM? Is there an LLM tool that means you can do that in Salesforce where you couldn't do it before, or you can do it in your vertical app that you couldn't do before?" "All of which is a long way of saying, what does this do to software? And it must be more software. Way more software." Benedict Evans with Erik Torenberg

Benedict Evans says AI means more software, not less: "There's going to be a bunch of stuff you could do with software that you just couldn't do before at all. And so there will be more competition." "If you think about the enterprise software fleet today, you've got three buckets... big iron horizontal systems, so SAP and Workday and your CRM... vertical software... and then in the middle, this fuzzy improvised space of Excel and email and the shared file system." "Now you add ChatGPT to that. Do you do that in an LLM? Is there an LLM tool that means you can do that in Salesforce where you couldn't do it before, or you can do it in your vertical app that you couldn't do before?" "All of which is a long way of saying, what does this do to software? And it must be more software. Way more software." Benedict Evans with Erik Torenberg

a16z

36,975 views • 2 months ago

SITUATION EXPLAINED: Why is software the most important part of the AI hardware stack? We asked Anush Elangovan, VP of AI software at AMD "You got the data center, you got desktop, you got laptops, you got FPGAs. And in time, we have multiple generations of each. So if you map this whole terrain out, software is gonna have to map across so much hardware variation that this is kind of like the golden age of abstractions." "We wanna abstract it in a way that you almost have to automate it too. Because there's gonna be a combinatorial explosion of cases that we have to handle. But every one of them is gonna expect day zero support and performant models." "You're not doing performance optimization of one platform. You're doing performance optimization of N platforms across like a time machine. And when a new model drops, every combination is gonna be looking for it." "Because AI is gonna suck up every flop that exists. Any flop, any compute you have anywhere is something that AI could be using: your laptop doing local tokens for coding sessions, grepping files, bash commands, voice commands done locally for latency reasons."

SITUATION EXPLAINED: Why is software the most important part of the AI hardware stack? We asked Anush Elangovan, VP of AI software at AMD "You got the data center, you got desktop, you got laptops, you got FPGAs. And in time, we have multiple generations of each. So if you map this whole terrain out, software is gonna have to map across so much hardware variation that this is kind of like the golden age of abstractions." "We wanna abstract it in a way that you almost have to automate it too. Because there's gonna be a combinatorial explosion of cases that we have to handle. But every one of them is gonna expect day zero support and performant models." "You're not doing performance optimization of one platform. You're doing performance optimization of N platforms across like a time machine. And when a new model drops, every combination is gonna be looking for it." "Because AI is gonna suck up every flop that exists. Any flop, any compute you have anywhere is something that AI could be using: your laptop doing local tokens for coding sessions, grepping files, bash commands, voice commands done locally for latency reasons."

MTS

17,297 views • 1 month ago

I asked Dan Martell to walk me through every level of making money with AI. He gave me the most simple, practical advice I've ever heard on this subject. Level 1 - Making $0 - $100k Level 2 - Making $1m - $10m Level 3 - Building a $10m++ enterprise. 0:00 Only 5% of the World Has Ever Paid for AI 0:46 The Easiest Thing to Sell With AI Right Now 1:56 The Marcus and Sophie Framework 4:24 Theory of Constraints (Right Problem to Solve) 5:33 What Is the Number One Business Constraint 7:13 How to Leave Your Job and Go All In 8:27 Business Is Simple Find a Problem and Solve It 9:08 Stop Getting Ready to Get Ready 9:33 The Sarah Story One Text and $10K 9:53 Pull Up Your Phone and Message Your Contacts 11:05 Dan's Son Gets His First Client at $800/Month 12:41 Best Employee vs. Best Employer 13:59 What Other Services Can You Sell With AI 14:44 Sales Is Not Talking It's Asking 17:01 What to Do When You Hate Your Business 18:40 Pain and Pleasure Are the Only Two Motivators 19:13 They Haven't Made It a Must Yet 20:29 Make It a Must Not a Nice to Have 21:06 The Jen Story and the Gasping Moment 22:17 How to Find Your First 10 to 15 Clients 28:38 The Personal Brand Play 33:06 Vision Is What AI Cannot Do 34:55 Hard for Computers Easy for Humans 36:13 Level 2 Making Your First Million With AI 37:18 The Replacement Ladder Framework 37:39 Admin First Then Delivery Then Marketing 39:09 Why Marketing Is the Biggest AI Category 39:32 Why You Should Keep Sales for Yourself 40:00 Level 5 Leadership and AI Agents 41:41 What a Fully AI Systems Business Looks Like 43:13 The Gym Owner With Three Locations 46:16 Shutting Down the Company for Two Days 46:37 Teaching the Whole Team to Code in Claude 49:28 Wayne the 62 Year Old Who Made $12K a Month 52:38 I Only Share What Actually Works 53:21 Whisper Flow and Talking to Your AI 56:41 Claude Chat Claude Coworker and Claude Code 57:57 The Claude Browser Extension 58:49 Claude Code Is Not Just for Developers 1:00:06 How to Migrate Your AI Memory Across Tools 1:01:08 Level 3 $1M to $10M and the Brand Play 1:02:05 Nobody Buys AI They Buy Trust 1:03:25 Brand Is Association and Association Is Trust 1:05:12 A Million Followers Is $10M in Activated Revenue 1:07:03 How to Keep AI From Becoming Slop 1:07:42 Human in the Loop 1:08:16 The 10 80 10 Rule and Why AI Is Now the 80 1:10:01 The Team FIRED Themselves 1:11:45 Dan's Free AI Curriculum for Your Team

Grant

167,714 views • 2 months ago

AI is changing the software engineering craft. Anders Hejlsberg (Anders Hejlsberg) - creator of C#, TypeScript and industry legend - on why code review needs to get more enjoyable in response: #1 - AI is shifting the craft from writing code, to reviewing code: "In a sense, we're all turning into project managers. We can have an army of junior programmers, called agents, that will just spit out reams of code but someone's got to have the big picture and review all of that. And so, increasingly, our craft is going from one of writing the code, to one of reviewing the code and building the architecture of the code and overseeing the work. It's a different kind of craft. It's a different kind of enjoyment. I've always liked writing the code. To me that was the fulfilling part, seeing it work. In a way, AI robs a little bit of that, because I am less interested in reviewing code." #2 - The code review experience should be improved: "I think we could also make the process of reviewing code much more interesting than it is today. I mean, today, you see a list of diffs in alphabetical order and now it's up to you to make heads or tails of it. There are more pedagogical ways of presenting that. And you could have commentary generated by the AI that tells you what the changes are and whatever, and then tries to guide you along. So that symbiotic relationship, I think we need to work on that more and to keep the enjoyment in there."

AI is changing the software engineering craft. Anders Hejlsberg (Anders Hejlsberg) - creator of C#, TypeScript and industry legend - on why code review needs to get more enjoyable in response: #1 - AI is shifting the craft from writing code, to reviewing code: "In a sense, we're all turning into project managers. We can have an army of junior programmers, called agents, that will just spit out reams of code but someone's got to have the big picture and review all of that. And so, increasingly, our craft is going from one of writing the code, to one of reviewing the code and building the architecture of the code and overseeing the work. It's a different kind of craft. It's a different kind of enjoyment. I've always liked writing the code. To me that was the fulfilling part, seeing it work. In a way, AI robs a little bit of that, because I am less interested in reviewing code." #2 - The code review experience should be improved: "I think we could also make the process of reviewing code much more interesting than it is today. I mean, today, you see a list of diffs in alphabetical order and now it's up to you to make heads or tails of it. There are more pedagogical ways of presenting that. And you could have commentary generated by the AI that tells you what the changes are and whatever, and then tries to guide you along. So that symbiotic relationship, I think we need to work on that more and to keep the enjoyment in there."

The Pragmatic Engineer

39,073 views • 3 months ago

Kelsey Hightower has one of the most inspiring stories in tech: he went from a technician installing DSL modems, through self-directed study and very hard work, to one of the very few Distinguished Engineer at Google whom Satya Nadella personally persuaded to join Microsoft. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 03:34 Kelsey’s first job at McDonald’s 05:04 His non-traditional path into tech 11:45 Landing his first tech job with an A+ certification 15:33 His entrepreneurial years 19:45 Joining Google as a data center technician 27:48 Learning automation at a Rackspace spinoff 33:26 Moving into financial services 50:00 Building a reputation through open source 53:55 From configuration management to containers 1:08:20 The rise of Kubernetes 1:25:05 Why he almost joined NASA instead of Google 1:29:20 Defining DevRel at Google 1:38:20 Demonstrating impact at Google 1:41:20 Microsoft's offer 1:55:20 Learning how to slow down 2:06:39 Advising and investing 2:15:03 A people-first view of GenAI 2:24:27 Using AI with guardrails 2:28:26 Matching AI to the task 2:36:06 Staying relevant in the AI era Brought to you by outstanding teams building products I love: • Antithesis: verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • Sentry: application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers • Buildkite: CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue. OpenAI, Anthropic, Uber and others are customers: Three interesting learnings from Kelsey: 1. Side hustles and doing your own thing teach you business like no IC job can. Before becoming a software engineer at Google, Kelsey was a manager for his comedian friend, operated a computer store, and did IT contracting. These gigs taught him logistics, planning, and about money. All this helped him be far more effective at talking with executives and acting as an executive sponsor inside Google. 2. Can you explain what your startup does without mentioning AI? When Kelsey researches startups seeking his advice, he challenges founders to not say “AI” once. This means that they must explain the actual value their company creates. One unexpected benefit of this is that it often reveals there are easier, cheaper ways to achieve a goal than with AI. 3. It’s very rare to get an extra zero put on your compensation figure – but it happened. Kelsey was a successful, well-paid Google engineer when Microsoft made him an offer that 10x’d his salary (!!). When Kelsey told Google he was planning to take the offer, it matched the offer, proving that his market value had massively increased. It shows that being well paid doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being paid at the correct market rate.

Kelsey Hightower has one of the most inspiring stories in tech: he went from a technician installing DSL modems, through self-directed study and very hard work, to one of the very few Distinguished Engineer at Google whom Satya Nadella personally persuaded to join Microsoft. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 03:34 Kelsey’s first job at McDonald’s 05:04 His non-traditional path into tech 11:45 Landing his first tech job with an A+ certification 15:33 His entrepreneurial years 19:45 Joining Google as a data center technician 27:48 Learning automation at a Rackspace spinoff 33:26 Moving into financial services 50:00 Building a reputation through open source 53:55 From configuration management to containers 1:08:20 The rise of Kubernetes 1:25:05 Why he almost joined NASA instead of Google 1:29:20 Defining DevRel at Google 1:38:20 Demonstrating impact at Google 1:41:20 Microsoft's offer 1:55:20 Learning how to slow down 2:06:39 Advising and investing 2:15:03 A people-first view of GenAI 2:24:27 Using AI with guardrails 2:28:26 Matching AI to the task 2:36:06 Staying relevant in the AI era Brought to you by outstanding teams building products I love: • Antithesis: verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • Sentry: application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers • Buildkite: CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue. OpenAI, Anthropic, Uber and others are customers: Three interesting learnings from Kelsey: 1. Side hustles and doing your own thing teach you business like no IC job can. Before becoming a software engineer at Google, Kelsey was a manager for his comedian friend, operated a computer store, and did IT contracting. These gigs taught him logistics, planning, and about money. All this helped him be far more effective at talking with executives and acting as an executive sponsor inside Google. 2. Can you explain what your startup does without mentioning AI? When Kelsey researches startups seeking his advice, he challenges founders to not say “AI” once. This means that they must explain the actual value their company creates. One unexpected benefit of this is that it often reveals there are easier, cheaper ways to achieve a goal than with AI. 3. It’s very rare to get an extra zero put on your compensation figure – but it happened. Kelsey was a successful, well-paid Google engineer when Microsoft made him an offer that 10x’d his salary (!!). When Kelsey told Google he was planning to take the offer, it matched the offer, proving that his market value had massively increased. It shows that being well paid doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being paid at the correct market rate.

Gergely Orosz

61,547 views • 2 months ago

Steve Jobs: The difference between good people and great people is 50-to-1 “I’ve always considered part of my job was to keep the quality level of people in the organizations I work with very high. I mean that’s what I consider one of the few things I can contribute individually myself — versus the team that work with — is to really try to instill in the organization the goal of having only A players.” Steve argues this is especially important in technology where there’s a huge range between the best person and the worst person: “In a lot of fields, the difference between, say, the worst taxicab driver and the best taxicab driver to get you across town in Manhattan might be 2-to-1. The best one will get you there in 15 minutes, the worst one will get you there in half an hour… Or the best cook and the worst cook, maybe it’s 3-to-1… But in the field that I’m in. In software in particular. The difference between the best person and the worst person is about 100-to-1 or more.” He continues: “The difference between a good software person and a great software person is probably 50-to-1 or 25-to-1. Huge dynamic range. And therefore, I have found — and not just in software but in almost everything I’ve done — it really pays to go after the best people in the world.” But as Steve points out, this isn’t always easy: “It’s very painful when you have some people that are not the best people in the world, and you have to get rid of them. But I’ve found that my job has sometimes been exactly that, to get rid of some of the people that didn’t measure up. And I’ve always tried to do it in a humane way, but nonetheless it has to be done and it’s not ever fun.”

Steve Jobs: The difference between good people and great people is 50-to-1 “I’ve always considered part of my job was to keep the quality level of people in the organizations I work with very high. I mean that’s what I consider one of the few things I can contribute individually myself — versus the team that work with — is to really try to instill in the organization the goal of having only A players.” Steve argues this is especially important in technology where there’s a huge range between the best person and the worst person: “In a lot of fields, the difference between, say, the worst taxicab driver and the best taxicab driver to get you across town in Manhattan might be 2-to-1. The best one will get you there in 15 minutes, the worst one will get you there in half an hour… Or the best cook and the worst cook, maybe it’s 3-to-1… But in the field that I’m in. In software in particular. The difference between the best person and the worst person is about 100-to-1 or more.” He continues: “The difference between a good software person and a great software person is probably 50-to-1 or 25-to-1. Huge dynamic range. And therefore, I have found — and not just in software but in almost everything I’ve done — it really pays to go after the best people in the world.” But as Steve points out, this isn’t always easy: “It’s very painful when you have some people that are not the best people in the world, and you have to get rid of them. But I’ve found that my job has sometimes been exactly that, to get rid of some of the people that didn’t measure up. And I’ve always tried to do it in a humane way, but nonetheless it has to be done and it’s not ever fun.”

Startup Archive

45,180 views • 7 months ago

Some personal hot takes from AI: engineer Miami follows... 1. Software development is a dead-end profession because anyone can be a software developer now. 2. Anyone can use Cursor or any other tool and generate code. Being a coder and being a software engineer are different. 3. Computers used to be gated; now everyone has the power to make computers malleable. Everyone is a software developer now, but that does not mean they are software engineers 4. If you cannot demonstrate how a coding agent works, you are just a consumer and have imposed an artificial glass ceiling on your career as a software engineer. 5. If you are curious, you will have a job. If you have not been curious in the last two years, you are replaceable. 6. SaaS per-seat economics may become unstable as customers need fewer people to achieve results, prompting founders to think about new unit economics 7. Most companies will take two or three years (or more!) to figure out AI transformation. 8. Some companies are already building AI native teams of five to ten people who can build with the grain of AI 9. There will be an explosion in the number of software developers. Software development is now essentially free, and tokens are cheaper than humans 10. Not enough engineers know what it means to be a product engineer 11. JIRA ticket monkeys are cooked 12. If your company has banned AI, you should quit that company 13. AI is more like a musical instrument than just a tool play with it, make discoveries, build intuition learn where AI is good and where it fails

Some personal hot takes from AI: engineer Miami follows... 1. Software development is a dead-end profession because anyone can be a software developer now. 2. Anyone can use Cursor or any other tool and generate code. Being a coder and being a software engineer are different. 3. Computers used to be gated; now everyone has the power to make computers malleable. Everyone is a software developer now, but that does not mean they are software engineers 4. If you cannot demonstrate how a coding agent works, you are just a consumer and have imposed an artificial glass ceiling on your career as a software engineer. 5. If you are curious, you will have a job. If you have not been curious in the last two years, you are replaceable. 6. SaaS per-seat economics may become unstable as customers need fewer people to achieve results, prompting founders to think about new unit economics 7. Most companies will take two or three years (or more!) to figure out AI transformation. 8. Some companies are already building AI native teams of five to ten people who can build with the grain of AI 9. There will be an explosion in the number of software developers. Software development is now essentially free, and tokens are cheaper than humans 10. Not enough engineers know what it means to be a product engineer 11. JIRA ticket monkeys are cooked 12. If your company has banned AI, you should quit that company 13. AI is more like a musical instrument than just a tool play with it, make discoveries, build intuition learn where AI is good and where it fails

geoff

70,867 views • 2 months ago

How have the fundamentals of building large, distributed software systems changed the last decade? A conversation with Martin Kleppmann (author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications) - given that the second, updated edition of the book was just released. Timestamps: 00:00 Early career 05:46 Building Rapportive 10:47 Working at LinkedIn 14:09 Writing Designing Data-Intensive Applications 23:00 Reliability, scalability, and repeatability 26:24 DDIA: the second edition 30:50 Tradeoffs of using cloud services 39:02 How the cloud changed scaling 42:53 The trouble with distributed systems 49:02 Ethics for software engineers 52:45 Formal verification 1:00:12 Academia vs. industry 1:03:50 Local-first software 1:09:50 Computer science education 1:18:32 Martin’s current research and advice Brought to you by: • Statsig – ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for code verification and automated code review. Check out Sonar's new architecture management capabilities that ensure both humans and AI agents respect your system’s blueprint. • WorkOS – Ship enterprise features – SSO, directory sync, RBAC, audit logs – in days, not months. Three things worth considering, as discussed with Martin, in this episode: 1. Multi-region and multi-cloud are risk/cost trade-offs, not best practices. Martin does not believe that there is a “best practice” in deciding whether to go multi-region or multi-cloud. This decision is a tradeoff between risk and costs. It’s a business decision to be made. Designing Data-Intensive Applications gives engineers the vocabulary to articulate the tradeoffs, not to dictate answers. 2. Replication for fault tolerance is more relevant for most engineers these days than sharding. Though the book has a full chapter on sharding, Martin said that the cloud has reduced the need for manual sharding for the majority of teams. This is also because machines are increasingly bigger, and more workloads fit on a single machine. Sharding across machines is increasingly a specialist concern; replication for fault tolerance, however, is still relevant at every scale. 3. Knowing system internals as a superpower for application developers. Martin maintains that Designing Data-Intensive Applications is not a book for people who build databases or even infrastructure, but it’s helpful for application developers to develop an intuition for making good design decisions and debugging performance issues we will eventually encounter.

How have the fundamentals of building large, distributed software systems changed the last decade? A conversation with Martin Kleppmann (author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications) - given that the second, updated edition of the book was just released. Timestamps: 00:00 Early career 05:46 Building Rapportive 10:47 Working at LinkedIn 14:09 Writing Designing Data-Intensive Applications 23:00 Reliability, scalability, and repeatability 26:24 DDIA: the second edition 30:50 Tradeoffs of using cloud services 39:02 How the cloud changed scaling 42:53 The trouble with distributed systems 49:02 Ethics for software engineers 52:45 Formal verification 1:00:12 Academia vs. industry 1:03:50 Local-first software 1:09:50 Computer science education 1:18:32 Martin’s current research and advice Brought to you by: • Statsig – ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for code verification and automated code review. Check out Sonar's new architecture management capabilities that ensure both humans and AI agents respect your system’s blueprint. • WorkOS – Ship enterprise features – SSO, directory sync, RBAC, audit logs – in days, not months. Three things worth considering, as discussed with Martin, in this episode: 1. Multi-region and multi-cloud are risk/cost trade-offs, not best practices. Martin does not believe that there is a “best practice” in deciding whether to go multi-region or multi-cloud. This decision is a tradeoff between risk and costs. It’s a business decision to be made. Designing Data-Intensive Applications gives engineers the vocabulary to articulate the tradeoffs, not to dictate answers. 2. Replication for fault tolerance is more relevant for most engineers these days than sharding. Though the book has a full chapter on sharding, Martin said that the cloud has reduced the need for manual sharding for the majority of teams. This is also because machines are increasingly bigger, and more workloads fit on a single machine. Sharding across machines is increasingly a specialist concern; replication for fault tolerance, however, is still relevant at every scale. 3. Knowing system internals as a superpower for application developers. Martin maintains that Designing Data-Intensive Applications is not a book for people who build databases or even infrastructure, but it’s helpful for application developers to develop an intuition for making good design decisions and debugging performance issues we will eventually encounter.

Gergely Orosz

79,406 views • 4 months ago