An interesting set of questions for candidates to ask interviews. I’d be happy to get any of these, although I wouldn’t be able to answer all of them (as an interviewer and not the hiring lead). It’s always informative hearing what someone asks (or when they have nothing to ask). I think my least favourite is when someone has researched me and uses that, although I certainly researched my interviewers when I was applying, too.

The practical fixes that keep being proposed treat [open-source] as a market anyway and bolt the missing pieces on, which is where bug bounties, sponsorship marketplaces, dependents-weighted funding formulas, criticality scores, and tokenised reward schemes all come from. Every one of them is an attempt to reconstruct a price for something that has never had one, and to do that they need a number to stand in for value.

Open-source is odd from an economics perspective. When hobbies intersect with the wider world - there are other examples like this in the volunteer space, but none so big, I guess.

Software has always depended on tools. I remember the time when I had to pay for compilers. These new tools are a flashback to times where creating software came with real costs. But now it’s no longer a one-time payment, it’s a constant dependency. Not just a dependency on a filled wallet, but also a cognitive dependency.

Interesting thoughts on loops (AI).

“observability” is what we call it now that “monitoring” doesn’t sound expensive enough

Pithy, but an interesting piece arguing for Clickhouse.

Despite the counterfactual section of this The Demoralization of The White-Collar Worker article, I feel much is also true here in NZ, and we are at risk of heading the same way with others, like retirement. It’s enormously frustrating that so many people feel we can increment our way of of this, rather than properly fix it.

Is it any wonder that software has always been such a fiercely collectivist endeavor, exquisitely sensitive to relationship dynamics and manners and questions of fairness and emotional valence? It’s exactly what you’d expect when part of your brain lives in other people’s brains, and your collective interdependence is sky high.

This follow-up post about AI is worth reading in general, but the above quote is just delightful.

Microservice architectures aren’t there for scaling the software itself, they’re there for scaling the software organization.

A good take that you don’t see often enough. Still not a fan in general, at least the way it’s often done :).

I love this little robot building story. I wish I did more of this.

Interesting post on marketing at Sentry two years after dropping cookies. I have a known positive bias towards Sentry, but I wish more companies experimented like this.

The links are annoyingly to Spotify (but all of these are on Apple Music) and some of the answers are clearly political (unsurprising given the people) but this is a pretty decent set of NZ music to listen to, even though NZMM is now over for 2026.

Very approachable and understandable (and well presented) explanation of reservoir sampling.

What the field requires, by their own account, is research — not half a trillion dollars in concrete and copper. The buildout is an answer to a question the technology has not yet resolved, built at a scale that forecloses the possibility of changing course when the research points somewhere else.

Also good points how the blurry way people talk about LLMs and the things that wrapping an LLM in a harness of software engineering knowledge and tooling confuses things.

Interesting read on the economics of software teams. I find it odd that this isn’t talked about more. Not only in terms of deliverability and work choices, but the financial cost of meetings and other “ceremonies”. Back in my PM days, I would try to tie roadmap choices to financial outcomes like this.

Previous general-purpose technologies diffused across decades, which gave workforces time to retrain, to relocate, and to move children into different trades than their parents. The steam engine, electrification, and the personal computer each took a working generation or more to reshape the labor market, and the adjustment, however brutal, happened on a human timescale. The current automation of cognitive work is compressing that timeline toward a handful of years. The compression is more striking because the measured payoff has not arrived. Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius said that AI investment added basically zero to United States economic growth in 2025 […]. Workers are paying the social cost of a bet that has not yet produced the promised aggregate gains.

This is the most significant aspect of the speed, I feel. I don’t agree with everything in the AI Job Grief post, in particular I’m not sure physical and manual labour workers don’t also tie identity and work. But it’s an interesting read.

For this:

The Futurology question, “everyone has lost their job and only 10 trillionaires own everything. Now what?”, has no cultural answer yet

The answer has to be government, and we have to vote accordingly.

But the thing is, LLMs are very flexible. And you can use them just as effectively to write high-quality code more slowly.

Solid advice worth reading, if you’re not rabidly anti-LLM.

Lately my first response to a Dependabot CVE alert, and a fair few of the routine version bumps, has been to check whether I still need the dependency at all before looking at what changed in it.

Solid advice.

I have no idea why another would want to do this with a phone but it is amazing that you can. Imagine doing this in front of someone even 25 years ago.

This is an amazingly well put together explanation of Turing machines.

A nice way to run daily standup meetings. I would like ours to move closer to this, although it’s not super far off. The only bit not feasible is holding them just before lunch, since people are in multiple time zones, so not everyone is lunching simultaneously.

The impossible things we have to believe. Depressing, but true.

You would leave your house and then just disappear. This is presented as kind of romantic now, as if we were just free spirits on the wind and could stop and really watch a sunset. In practice it was mostly an annoying game of attempting to guess where people were. You’d call their job, they had left. You’d call their house, they weren’t home yet. Presumably they were in transit but you actually had no idea.

A positive start to the improvements the internet has brought, before diving into how it all went terribly wrong.

The Boring Internet, a love letter to protocols.

The number an npm or PyPI API gives you is dominated by CI runners reinstalling the world on every push, with mirror traffic, bot scans, and the occasional human mixed in. It is not a count of users, or of installations, or of anything that maps cleanly to “how many people are affected if this breaks”.

and

CVE count is routinely used as a security signal and measures the opposite of what people assume.

and

Commit cadence and “last activity” penalise software that is finished.

and

a project that had eighty contributors in 2012 and has one exhausted person today shows a reassuring headcount, and there is no field anywhere in the API or the registry metadata for whether that one person is close to walking away.

Really, just read the whole thing.

I’ve only been to about a third of the locations in this ranking of Auckland movie theatres and some of those visits were quite some time ago. However, I generally agree with the ones I am familiar with (sorry Hoyts Hibiscus Coast, you are that bad, and I was there a few weeks back). Although:

• I would put Event Albany a little higher, dinging it mostly for the declining quality and diversity in the Gold Class menu.
• I think Event Queen St is unfairly high because of IMAX (which I have not attended). Take out IMAX and the place is a dismal, confusing, dump, far below a typical Event. Even the Gold Class area is weirdly small and unpleasant.

The ADR is where intent debt gets paid down.

Good arguments for ADRs being more critical with agentic workflows, but not relying on “Sarah” was always worth doing. I’ve been Sarah, and left, leaving a gap despite my best intentions.