Good list of lessons learnt in software engineering.

“1966! … Yet this person seemingly knew more about software development in 1966 than most managers of software product development companies do today. These are not new ideas, and sometimes it baffles me that they are not more widely known”. So true, and so sad.

My first experiments with using an LLM to help write code - TL;DR: disappointed so far.

Stamina looks great - an opinionated wrapper over Tenacity [via Simon Willison, who is for some reason still linking to Tweets?]

Good suggestions on processes to follow when making technical decisions - documenting the entire process of coming to a decision really has so many benefits.

Explanation of how to best serve various sizes/qualities of images. Is it wrong that I hate how complex this is?

The suggestion for handling streak recovery here is exactly what Knotwords (an excellent game) does, and it works really well.

I’ve broken streaks from unexpected busyness, ill health, or simple forgetfulness but have recovered them and it’s still motivating to continue.

Good tips on designing Pythonic library APIs from Ben Hoyt.

This is a sadly familiar story of chaos in product development. While the remedies are good things to do, I’m not convinced they address the core issue.

The analogy is a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but this IKEA Oriented Development post has some good suggestions.

Nice post that explains how to use PyParsing and Q objects in Django to build a search DSL (for example, GitHub’s where you can do “is:open reviewer:tonyandrewmeyer” and so on). [h/t Simon Willison]

Good coverage of pre-fetch and select related in Django.

Great post on using Latin abbreviations, especially cf - I do this too much, which I think originates from my time in education, where it’s an expected style.

DORA, SPACE, and using surveys as a tool to measure developer experience. I’ve never used (or worked for a company that uses) surveys like this - it would be super interesting to do, I think, although the article is right that it’s hard to do well, which can be an impediment.

A few years old, but a good set of uWSGI options that you should consider changing, as well as some lesser known functions of uWSGI. Everything is going ASGI now, and maybe uWSGI 2.1 fixes most of this, but useful in the meantime.

Advice on naming cli tools.

Interesting podcast in the history of Django, and a quote describing a very familiar issue (couldn’t figure a way to nicely share from Overcast to here, so via Mastodon).

“The 85% rule counterintuitively suggests that to reach maximum output, you need to refrain from giving maximum effort. Operating at 100% effort all of the time will result in burnout and ultimately less-optimal results”. via

I’ve used Celery a lot, and it’s been incredibly useful, but it has also been the cause of a lot of pain. I hope to write more about this, and comparing to other tools (e.g. I’m using Huey for simpler cases), when I have more time from next month. But this is an excellent summary of Celery pitfalls and suggested fixes.

Fairly positive thoughts on how LLMs and generative AI in general will impact developers - I think this generally aligns with my (current) thinking.

“FaceTime Voicemail: … Let’s say it’s a weird day and you actually call someone, they don’t pick up because it’s 2023 and ain’t nobody have time for that shit, so you hang up and text them feeling silly for calling them in the first place, right? RIGHT? I don’t know, Apple’s Gen X leadership is showing."

100%

“Engineers with more experience are usually able to more effectively paint the picture of the rough shape a project will take.” definitely what I have found (in myself and colleagues) as well. I like the focus on getting to the next demo, too. via

How Figma approached DB scaling (spoiler, horizontal via vertical partitioning). Whenever I come across things like this, which match what we did ages ago, I wonder how much of that was luck and how much past-me was better at his job than I realised.

This [post on GitHub stars] (https://the-guild.dev/blog/judging-open-source-by-github-stars) didn’t go where I expected (it covers buying stars) but was interesting. I hear people talking about stars a lot, but pay hardly any attention to it myself. Am I old?