Full Width [alt+shift+f] Shortcuts [alt+shift+k]
Sign Up [alt+shift+s] Log In [alt+shift+l]
15
Sprezzatura is “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it”, coined by Castiglione in 1528’s The Book of the Courtier.
over a year ago

Improve your reading experience

Logged in users get linked directly to articles resulting in a better reading experience. Please login for free, it takes less than 1 minute.

More from Matt Blewitt

Leadership Power Tools: SQL and Statistics

A common pattern I’ve seen over the years have been folks in engineering leadership positions that are not super comfortable with extracting and interpreting data from stores, be it databases, CSV files in an object store, or even just a spreadsheet. We’re going to cover SQL & DuckDB, then some useful statistical tools: summary stats, distributions, confidence intervals and Bayesian reasoning.

4 months ago 29 votes
7 Databases in 7 Weeks for 2025

I’ve been running databases-as-a-service for a long time, and there are always new things to keep abreast of - new technologies, different ways of solving problems, not to mention all the research coming out of universities. In 2025, consider spending a week with each of these database technologies.

5 months ago 33 votes
7 Languages in 7 Weeks for 2025

It’s been over 14 years since the original 7 Languages in 7 Weeks was first published, giving a hands on tour of Ruby, Clojure, Haskell, Io, Scala, Erlang and Prolog. Ruby achieved critical mass, to some degree so did Scala, with the others being popular within their specific niches. This post shows 7 languages worth exploring in 2025.

5 months ago 34 votes
What Is a Senior Engineer, Anyway?

I’ve been having a bunch of conversations with my team about our career ladder, and what it means to be “senior” in a software engineering context. It’s a little different in every company, but here is my view.

5 months ago 28 votes
Regular Restarts Are Good, Actually

Anecdotally, one of the more maligned features of the Heroku platform are the 24-hour limits on compute units, known as “dynos”. This is actually a good thing, but very misunderstood.

5 months ago 30 votes

More in technology

The Intuit vs the government cage fight

Daniel Boguslaw: Intuit, Owner of TurboTax, Wins Battle Against America’s Taxpayers Even when the Biden administration broke through in the Inflation Reduction Act to fund a pilot program for Direct File, which expanded to 25 states this tax season, Intuit didn’t stop fighting. Instead, it continued

5 days ago 7 votes
Eurorack Knob Idea

[Hardware] An idea for knobs for synthesizers.

5 days ago 14 votes
Robot Dexterity Still Seems Hard

You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting someone trying to build humanoid robots.

5 days ago 12 votes
Fire In The Hole, We’re Breaching The Vault - Commvault Remote Code Execution (CVE-2025-34028)

As we pack our bags and prepare for the adult-er version of BlackHat (that apparently doesn’t require us to print out stolen mailspoolz to hand to people at their talks), we want to tell you about a recent adventure - a heist, if you will. No heist story

5 days ago 12 votes
Reflecting

I know there’s been a lot of frustration directed at me specifically. Some of it, I believe, is misplaced—but I also understand where it’s coming from. The passing of Pope Francis has deeply impacted me. While I still disagree with the Church on many issues, he was the Pope who broke the mold in so … Continue reading Reflecting →

5 days ago 10 votes