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JA Westenberg reflects on six years of going solo after a career working for various conglomerates. She’s leveraging AI tools to automate most mundane and boring tasks, so she can focus on the creative, challenging, and ultimately fun work. According to her experience, these tools, when used effectively, will allow small companies and individuals to compete on equal footing with the giants of the industry: I think the future probably belongs to the small companies // individuals more than sprawling conglomerates. There is a huge opportunity for people who use AI to remove everything that isn’t judgment from their workload, and apply that judgement to good products and good services. My theory is that one person, with an AI-augmented operational layer plus taste is the company of the future - and I’d bet on that again and again. ...

Markdown doesn’t do most of what those formats do. You can’t set margins. You can’t do columns. You can’t embed a pivot table or track changes or add a watermark that says DRAFT across every page in 45-degree gray Calibri. Markdown doesn’t even have a native way to change the font color. And none of that mattered, because it turns out most writing isn’t about any of those things. Most writing is about getting words down in a structure that makes sense, and then getting those words in front of other people. Markdown does that with less friction than anything else ever created. You can learn it in ten minutes, write it in any text editor on any device, read the source file without rendering it, diff it in version control, and convert it to virtually any output format. ...

Senior engineering practitioners from major technology companies gathered for a multi-day retreat to confront the questions that matter most as AI transforms software development. The discussions covered more than twenty topics across breakout sessions, but the most significant insights didn’t emerge from one single session. Instead, they surfaced at various intersections; we found that the same concerns kept appearing in different conversations, framed by different people solving different problems. This publication synthesizes those cross-cutting themes, organized around the patterns that senior leaders need to understand and act on now. The retreat did not produce a single, unified vision of the future, but instead produced something more useful: a map of the fault lines where current practices are breaking and new ones are forming. ...

Someday years from now we will look back on the era when we were the last generation to code by hand. We’ll laugh and explain to our grandkids how silly it was that we typed out JavaScript syntax with our fingers. But secretly we’ll miss it. We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor. We’ll miss the sleepless wrangling of some odd bug that eventually relents to the debugger at 2 AM. We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.” ...

“Archivio Grafica Italiana is the first online archive dedicated to the entire Italian graphic design heritage.” Beautiful resource. Some samples came as a true surprise to me, like the New York City Subway signage, though the Italian connection is a bit weak on that one. (via)

The actual phrase ‘Dark Ages’ itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, which Caesar Baronius – a cardinal and Church historian – came up with around 1602. He applied the term exclusively to the tenth and eleventh centuries. However, and very significantly in his use of the term, Baronius was not decrying a state of scientific malaise, or a particularly turbulent political period – he’s talking about a lack of sources surviving from that time. Indeed, Baronius sees the cut off point for the dark ages to be the Gregorian reforms of 1046, following which we see a massive increase in surviving documentation. ...

Sam over at theTangentSpace has the perfect analysis on Europe’s sorry situation in these troubled times, so much so that I have a hard time picking just one or two paragraphs to quote here. Let’s just go with the opening: Europe must increasingly prepare for a world in which the protection of America is replaced by protection from America. An essential component of this is moving away from dependence on US goods and services and, perhaps most essential of all, US tech and tech infrastructure. ...

Writing forces clarity. When I explain a concept to others - in a doc, a talk, a code review comment, even just chatting with AI - I discover the gaps in my own understanding. The act of making something legible to someone else makes it more legible to me. – Addy Osmani in 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google The one quoted above is #12, and I’ve been religiously abiding by it for a long time, but all 21 are well worth reading. If you’ve been in software engineering long enough, they’ll resonate with you. Also, most lessons apply to all kinds of career paths, not just software. ...

As AI generated content becomes the norm, I believe that human-generated content and raw thoughts and emotion will become more valuable. In many ways, I’d rather read a raw, unproduced, and scrappy blog post with grammatical mistakes over perfectly generated content that serves little value. – Armeet Singh Jatyani, Importance of Writing

Every machine serves a purpose. People need purpose. The temptation to become the machine is higher than ever. The promise of the machine is alluring. If I can just keep chugging forward, I will end up somewhere that is not here. If I can turn myself into a mechanism that takes input and consistently works towards some goal, I will make it. [..] You’re not a machine. You’re a person. Play to your strengths. Be sharp and strategic like a scalpel, not blunt like a mallet. Stop fetishizing the grind. Dream bigger. ...