https://swizec.com/blog
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Can you believe I've been writing on swizec.com for 20 years? The blog started back when "have a website" was social media 🤯 Before that it was a webcomic site. Those posts do not survive but I recently found the sketches in my mom's basement and brought them to San Francisco. Little memento of a different path :) I got swizec.com in 2005 and started hosting websites on the linux machine in my bedroom, which was also my only computer and everyone's web router. Fun times. Gentoo was my distro of…
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 right of passage.
Feedback from an expert is how you learn taste. Your code doesn't matter until it's shipped.
The death of engineering has been greatly exaggerated. You still need to know what you're doing.
Hiring engineers is like deciding what kind of system you'll have. This seems obvious but surprised me to see first-hand.
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.
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.
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.
Traditional engineering levels were about skill progression. I think this has changed. Everyone now is a mini staff engineer.
You know what's better than a code review comment? A fix.
On AI, mental load, and delegation
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
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?
Forget the bullshit tips and tricks, just talk to it.
Read more papers. You can learn the latest and greatest in your field in one chill afternoon.
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?
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 I know never talk about their AI setup. The worst engineers I know only talk about their AI setup.
