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In a counter-intuitive observation: by making small, non-functional improvements, you gain more confidence in a new codebase, and can start to move faster.
5 months ago

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More from The Pragmatic Engineer

Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five years ago. Compared to other industries, job listings for software engineers grew much more in 2021-2022, but have declined much faster since. A look into possible reasons for this, and what could come next.

a week ago 21 votes
Where did TikTok’s software engineers go?

How has this uncertainty affected software engineers at the Chinese-owned social network?

3 weeks ago 17 votes
The Pragmatic Engineer 100K Giveaway

The Pragmatic Engineer's YouTube channel crossed 100K subscribers. Celebrating with a giveaway of 100 books and newsletter subs: 10x signed physical books (The Software Engineer’s Guidebook [in English or German - your choice!], Building Mobile Apps at Scale; winners get both; shipping is on me) 90x

3 weeks ago 19 votes
Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant?

Fresh data shows that the number of questions asked on StackOverflow are as low as they were back in 2009 – which was when StackOverflow was one years old. The drop suggests that ChatGPT – and LLMs – managed to make StackOverflow’s business model irrelevant in about two years’ time.

a month ago 45 votes
Where to find to The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast

The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast covers software engineering at Big Tech and startups, from the inside. We do deepdives with experienced engineers and tech professionals who share their hard-earned lessons, interesting stories and advice they have on building software. After each episode, you’ll walk away with pragmatic approaches you

a month ago 55 votes

More in technology

Apple’s new iPads are here, let’s break them down

Another day, another opportunity to rate my 2025 Apple predictions! iPad Here’s what I predicted would happen with the base iPad this year: I fully expect to see the 11th gen iPad in 2025, and I think it will come with a jump to the A17 Pro or

4 hours ago 2 votes
A lightweight file server running entirely on an Arduino Nano ESP32

Home file servers can be very useful for people who work across multiple devices and want easy access to their documents. And there are a lot of DIY build guides out there. But most of them are full-fledged NAS (network-attached storage) devices and they tend to rely on single-board computers. Those take a long time […] The post A lightweight file server running entirely on an Arduino Nano ESP32 appeared first on Arduino Blog.

7 hours ago 2 votes
The New Leverage: AI and the Power of Small Teams

This weekend, a small team in Latvia won an Oscar for a film they made using free software. That’s not just cool — it’s a sign of what’s coming. Sunday night was family movie night in my home. We picked a recent movie, FLOW. I’d heard good things about it and thought we’d enjoy it. What we didn’t know was that as we watched, the film won this year’s Academy Award as best animated feature. Afterwards, I saw this post from the movie’s director, Gints Zilbalodis: We established Dream Well Studio in Latvia for Flow. This room is the whole studio. Usually about 4-5 people were working at the same time including me. I was quite anxious about being in charge of a team, never having worked in any other studios before, but it worked out. pic.twitter.com/g39D6YxVWa — Gints Zilbalodis (@gintszilbalodis) January 26, 2025 Let that sink in: 4-5 people in a small room in Latvia led by a relatively inexperienced director used free software to make a movie that as of February 2025 had earned $20m and won an Oscar. I know it’s a bit more involved than that, but still – quite an accomplishment! But not unique. Billie Eilish and her brother Phineas produced her Grammy-winning debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in their home studio. And it’s not just cultural works such as movies and albums: small teams have built hugely successful products such as WhatsApp and Instagram. As computers and software get cheaper and more powerful, people can do more with less. And “more” here doesn’t mean just a bit better (pardon the pun) – it means among the world’s best. And as services and products continue migrating from the world of atoms to the world of bits, creators’ scope of action grows. This trend isn’t new. But with AI in the mix, things are about to go into overdrive. Zilbalodis and his collaborators could produce their film because someone else built Blender; they worked within its capabilities and constraints. But what if their vision exceeded what the software can do? Just a few years ago, the question likely wouldn’t even come up. Developing software calls for different abilities. Until recently, a small team had to choose: either make the movie or build the tools. AI changes that, since it enables small teams to “hire” virtual software developers. Of course, this principle extends beyond movies: anything that can be represented symbolically is in scope. And it’s not just creative abilities, such as writing, playing music, or drawing, but also more other business functions such as scheduling, legal consultations, financial transactions, etc. We’re not there yet. But if trends hold, we’ll soon see agent-driven systems do for other kinds of businesses what Blender did for Dream Well Studio. Have you dreamed of making a niche digital product to scratch an itch? That’s possible now. Soon, you’ll be able to build a business around it quickly, easily, and without needing lots of other humans in the mix. Many people have lost their jobs over the last three years. Those jobs likely won’t be replaced with AIs soon. But job markets aren’t on track to stability. If anything, they’re getting weirder. While it’s early days, AI promises some degree of resiliency. For people with entrepreneurial drive, it’s an exciting time: we can take ideas from vision to execution faster, cheaper, and at greater scale than ever. For others, it’ll be unsettling – or outright scary. We’re about to see a major shift in who can create, innovate, and compete in the market. The next big thing might not come from a giant company, but from a small team – or even an individual – using AI-powered tools. I expect an entrepreneurial surge driven by necessity and opportunity. How will you adapt?

13 hours ago 1 votes
So much time and money for a minor vibe shift

Gary Marcus: Hot Take: GPT 4.5 Is a Nothing Burger Half a trillion dollars later, there is still no viable business model, profits are modest at best for everyone except Nvidia and some consulting forms, there’s still basically no moat, and still no GPT-5. Any reasonable person

an hour ago 1 votes
This vending machine draws generative art for just a euro

If you hear the term “generative art” today, you probably subconsciously add “AI” to the beginning without even thinking about it. But generative art techniques existed long before modern AI came along — they even predate digital computing altogether. Despite that long history, generative art remains interesting as consumers attempt to identify patterns in the […] The post This vending machine draws generative art for just a euro appeared first on Arduino Blog.

yesterday 2 votes