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Giving more tools to software engineers: the reorganization of the factory

from Home on Erik Bernhardsson [alt+shift+b] in technology

It's a popular attitude among developers to rant about our tools and how broken things are. Maybe I'm an optimistic person, because my viewpoint is the complete opposite! I had my first job as a software engineer in 1999, and in the last two decades I've seen software engineering changing in ways that have made us orders of magnitude more productive.
16th Dec 2020

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More from Home on Erik Bernhardsson

It's hard to write code for computers, but it's even harder to write code for humans

Writing code for a computer is hard enough. You take something big and fuzzy, some large vague business outcome you want to achive. Then you break it down recursively and think about all the cases until you have clear logical statements a computer can follow.

27th Sep 2024 • 39 votes
Predicting solar eclipses with Python

As I am en route to see my first total solar eclipse, I was curious how hard it would be to compute eclipses in Python. It turns out, ignoring some minor coordinate system head-banging, I was able to get something half-decent working in a couple of hours.

7th Apr 2024 • 41 votes
Simple sabotage for software

CIA produced a fantastic book during the peak of World War 2 called Simple Sabotage. It laid out various ways for infiltrators to ruin productivity of a company. Some of the advice is timeless, for instance the section about “General interference with Organizations and Production”:

13th Dec 2023 • 40 votes
What I have been working on: Modal

Long story short: I'm working on a super cool tool called Modal. Please check it out — it lets you run things in the cloud without having to think about infrastructure. Scaling out, scheduling, containerization, using GPUs, setting up webhooks, and all kinds of other stuff.

7th Dec 2022 • 42 votes
We are still early with the cloud: why software development is overdue for a change

This is is in many respects a successor to a blog post I wrote last year about what I want from software infrastructure, but the ideas morphed in my head into something sort of wider.

19th Oct 2022 • 42 votes

More in technology

Radxa's Q8B has 2x the performance and expansion of the Pi 5

There was a time I'd look at a board like the Radxa Dragon Q8B (at left, above) and be like, "there's no way I'd spend $209 on an SBC with 8 gigs of RAM". But we're in 2026, and seeing the 8 gig Raspberry Pi 5 going for almost the same amount, I figured I'd give it a shot. On paper, the Q8B beats the Pi 5 in pretty much every way. A lot of that is thanks to this Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip, which is the same chip I tested on Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023.

20 hours ago • 1 votes
Three years later

Reflections on October 7th

2 days ago • 1 votes
The Sting

The Sting belongs in the pantheon of films I'm deeply embarrassed to have not watched earlier. Not just because it's a great film — and it is — but because it is so incredibly my shit that I feel retroactively spurned for not having watched it sooner.

2 days ago • 1 votes
It's a Gas!

If everything worked as well as the product called Evapo-Rust, the world would be a much better place. That’s just one of the many lessons learned during my recent — successful! — project to transform my old, nonfunctioning gasoline-powered generator into something much better.

3 days ago • 1 votes
I deleted my favorite feature, and the image got better: Direct Binary Search (DBS) in OpenDithering

When I created OpenDithering back in June, the feature I was proudest of was the Auto-tune button. It did the slider work for me: it compared the dithered result to the original image, nudged the settings, and repeated until the image stopped improving. Over the summer it grew into a three-step process (Auto Expose, Color-tune, […] The post I deleted my favorite feature, and the image got better: Direct Binary Search (DBS) in OpenDithering appeared first on Style over Substance.

4 days ago • 1 votes
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