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Many (most?) engineers go from university to a sizable company significantly distancing them from the actual value their code creates. They labour under the delusion that they’re paid to write code. In fact, they’re paid to make money, and writing code is probably the most expensive way that they can do that. They will often say things like “We should scrap this entirely and re-write it, it will only take 8 months” – often about code that generates 8 figures in revenue and employs several dozen people. Code that pays for their smartwatches. But, of course: Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things – Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice In my estimate it takes about a decade of experience before engineers start to really internalize this. This can be significantly sped up by having a shorter feedback loop between the code written and the value realized by the engineer. There are two ways to do this: Freelancing Founding Freelancing By freelancing, and doing it well, the reward, is very directly tied to the code written. The best way to do freelance, for the sake of learning, would be to work on fixed cost contracts – which isn’t great freelancing advice, but is excellent for the longterm career. Delivering to someone elses specs makes engineers focused on delivery only the necessary and sufficient code to make that happen. All the correct decisions result in an improvement of the engineers earnings per hour and all mistakes in a reduction. That feedback loop very quickly teaches: The importance of quality and automated testing Architecture and keeping options open Communication and requirements gathering, asking the right questions All of these are factors that come into play once an engineer is breaking the barrier from Senior to management or Staff. Founding a company Founding a company, where the code that you produced secures your salary, teaches those lessons, plus a few others: Understanding the importance tradeoffs that companies make betwen velocity and tech debt It is also an opportunity to learn how to make those tradeoffs well, something engineers aren’t always great at Experience creating the most value possible with the least code Very few enginers pre-emtively suggest ways to test product hyptheses using cheaper appoaches Pragmatism and bias towards shipping and avoidingg gold-plating functionality that is immature Plus you very quickly start to understand why “We should re-write it” is almost never the right business decision. All software engineers should freelance or found a business was originally published by Ognjen Regoje at Ognjen Regoje • ognjen.io on April 18, 2025.
In The Innovator’s Dilemma Christensen talks about how when acquiring a company you might either be acquiring its product or its processes. Depending on which it is, you need to handle the integration differently. I’ve realized that hiring a new manager follows a similar pattern: either they’re expected to integrate into the organization, or be independent and create some change. That expectation depends on whether the team, and possibly the wider organization, function well. If the team is high-performing, why would adding or overhauling processes make sense over fine-tuning existing ones? But new managers often join and immediately start suggesting ways to fix things. In many of these cases, they aren’t suggesting some best practices but are simply trying to have the new company function in a similar way to their previous one. But they never have enough context to justify these changes. What they should do is take a step back and understand why they were hired and what already works. Are they there to run the team as it is and perhaps look for marginal gains in efficiency and effectiveness? Or are they there because things are fundamentally broken and they need to overhaul the organization? In 9 out of 10 cases, it’s the first one. They’re there to ensure the continuity of the team. Therefore in 9 out of 10 cases the objective should be to integrate into the processes as quickly as possible and help iterate. Why are you here, manager? was originally published by Ognjen Regoje at Ognjen Regoje • ognjen.io on April 18, 2025.
I love Ben Brode’s Design Lessons from Improv talk. It presents techniques that we could all use more frequently. I particularly took the “Yes, and…“ to heart. It is an excellent technique, or attitude really, that keeps the conversation going. Conversations often start slow but get progressively more interesting the deeper you go. And “Yes, and…” makes it possible to get there. One of my favorite uses of “Yes, and…” is when someone sends you an article that you’ve already read or a video you’ve already watched. The typical response might be 👍 seen it (A whole site is named after the fact that you’ve already read it) If the other person is interested in having a conversation, you’ve just stopped it in its tracks expecting them to put in all the effort to keep it going. A “Yes, and…” response such as “Yes, I’ve read it, and something you found interesting” opens up the conversation. Even if the other person just wanted to share something they thought you might find interesting, you’ve: a) created an opportunity to exchange opinions and b) put in slightly above the bare minimum of effort to acknowledge that what they shared with you was indeed interesting At work At work, specifically, it is useful in all manner of discussions. Conversations about product, or code, or architecture, or team activities, or customer service all get better when you don’t dismiss but build on top of each other. The value of "Yes, and..." was originally published by Ognjen Regoje at Ognjen Regoje • ognjen.io on April 17, 2025.
There is nothing as inevitable as a re-org when a new VP joins. When a new executive joins they’re often overwhelmed by the amount of context they need to absorb to start being effective. The more seasoned ones aren’t pertrubed by this: they understand that gathering this context is their full-time job for the next several weeks or months. There’s even a book about this period. The less savvy ones, on the other hand, often reach for one of the following coping strategies, depending on the type of role they occupy. This organization makes no sense, we must re-organize it immediately Spoken by a newly joined VP who needs to assess the organization and understand why it is set up the way it is. It results in several workshops about boundaries, Conway’s law and team topologies result in a slightly different, but not materially significant organization. And a VP with a much better understanding of their people, the culture, the product and the challenges. We must document/map it Spoken by a product manager getting to grips with the features they’ll be working on before having read the abundant sales, technical and product reference materials. This usually results in several workshops where there is a lot of “discovery” and “mapping”. In reality, the product manager is getting an in-person crash course. It rarely results in any new discoveries or documentation or maps being produced but always results in a much more confident product manager. We must have a process for that Spoken by a new engineering manager who’s not yet familiar with the existing processes and ways of working. This usually results in the engineering manager starting to write a Confluence page on how the process should work, until one of the team members sends them an existing, but finished, Confluence page on exactly that, but with slight differences. The new page gets a link to the existing ones and is promptly forgotten. Does this process really work for anyone? A sub-category of the above then the process in place is different from their previous employer. This code is so bad, we must re-write it entirely Spoken by a senior but not yet quite staff engineer who’s just getting to grips with a new codebase – often about code that generates 7 or 8 digits in revenue. It results in the engineer spending several hours on an alternative architecture and running it by their team several times. Eventually, they understand that what they’re suggesting is quite similar to what is actually in place, that there is some refactoring and improvements to be done, but it’s nowhere near as tragic as they imagined it to be. Why does this happen? A week or two after joining, depending on how generous the company is, the engineer gets a ticket to work on, the PM is asked about the backlog priority and the EM why their bug injection rate is so high and what they’re doing about it. And they naturally feel lost. The problem is that most companies don’t set an expected timeline for having a person become effective in their position. How to do better? The amount of context required to be effective increases with seniority. But everyone needs a couple of weeks outside of the default onboarding programme to read through their team’s wiki space, to look through the backlog, to pair with their colleagues, to get an understanding of the work the team is doing, to be present at the retrospectives to listen and not have to lead and facilitate. Only after they get the lay of the land can they start contributing in a meaningful way. The managerial fear of the unknown was originally published by Ognjen Regoje at Ognjen Regoje • ognjen.io on April 17, 2025.
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<![CDATA[I'm exploring another corner of the Interlisp ecosystem and history: the Interlisp-10 implementation for DEC PDP-10 mainframes, a 1970s character based environment that predated the graphical Interlisp-D system. I approached this corner when I set out to learn and experiment with a tool I initially checked out only superficially, the TTY editor. This command line structure editor for Lisp code and expressions was the only one of Interlisp-10. The oldest of the Interlisp editors, it came before graphical interfaces and SEdit. On Medley Interlisp the TTY editor is still useful for specialized tasks. For example, its extensive set of commands with macro support is effectively a little language for batch editing and list structure manipulation. Think Unix sed for s-exps. The language even provides the variable EDITMACROS (wink wink). Evaluating (PRINTDEF EDITMACROS) gives a flavor for the language. For an experience closer to 1970s Interlisp I'm using the editor in its original environment, Interlisp-10 on TWENEX. SDF provides a publicly accessible TWENEX system running on a PDP-10 setup. With the product name TOPS-20, TWENEX was a DEC operating system for DECSYSTEM-20/PDP-10 mainframes derived from TENEX originally developed by BBN. SDF's TWENEX system comes with Interlisp-10 and other languages. This is Interlisp-10 in a TWENEX session accessed from my Linux box: A screenshot of a Linux terminal showing Interlisp-10 running under TWENEX in a SSH session. Creating a TWENEX account is straightforward but I didn't receive the initial password via email as expected. After reporting this to the twenex-l mailing list I was soon emailed the password which I changed with the TWENEX command CHANGE DIRECTORY PASSWORD. Interacting with TWENEX is less alien or arcane than I thought. I recognize the influence of TENEX and TWENEX on Interlisp terminology and notation. For example, the Interlisp REPL is called Exec after the Exec command processor of the TENEX operating system. And, like TENEX, Interlisp uses angle brackets as part of directory names. It's clear the influence of these operating systems also on the design of CP/M and hence MS-DOS, for example the commands DIR and TYPE. SDF's TWENEX system provides a complete Interlisp-10 implementation with only one notable omission: HELPSYS, the interactive facility for consulting the online documentation of Interlisp. The SDF wiki describes the basics of using Interlisp-10 and editing Lisp code with the TTY editor. After a couple of years of experience with Medley Interlisp the Interlisp-10 environment feels familiar. Most of the same functions and commands control the development tools and facilities. My first impression of the TTY editor is it's reasonably efficient and intuitive to edit Lisp code, at least using the basic commands. One thing that's not immediately apparent is that EDITF, the entry point for editing a function, works only with existing functions and can't create new ones. The workaround is to define a stub from the Exec like this: (DEFINEQ (NEW.FUNCTION () T)) and then call (EDITF NEW.FUNCTION) to flesh it out. Transferring files between TWENEX and the external world, such as my Linux box, involves two steps because the TWENEX system is not accessible outside of SDF. First, I log into Unix on sdf.org with my SDF account and from there ftp to kankan.twenex.org (172.16.36.36) with my TWENEX account. Once the TWENEX files are on Unix I access them from Linux with scp or sftp to sdf.org. This may require the ARPA tier of SDF membership. Everything is ready for a small Interlisp-10 programming project. #Interlisp #Lisp a href="https://remark.as/p/journal.paoloamoroso.com/exploring-interlisp-10-and-twenex"Discuss.../a Email | Reply @amoroso@oldbytes.space !--emailsub--]]>
Total disassociation, fully out your mind That Funny Feeling I was thinking today about a disc jockey. Like one in the 80s, where you actually had to put the records on the turntables to get the music. You move the information. You were the file system. I like the Retro Game Mechanics channel on YouTube. What was possible was limited by the hardware, and in a weird way it forced games to be good. Skill was apparent by a quick viewing, and different skill is usually highly correlated. Good graphics meant good story – not true today. I was thinking about all the noobs showing up to comma. If you can put a technical barrier up to stop them, like it used to be. But you can’t. These barriers can’t be fake, because a fake barrier isn’t like a real barrier. A fake barrier is one small patch away from being gone. What if the Internet was a mistake? I feel like it’s breaking my brain. It was this mind expanding world in my childhood, but now it’s a set of narrow loops that are harder and harder to get out of. And you can’t escape it. Once you have Starlink to your phone, not having the Internet with you will be a choice, not a real barrier. There’s nowhere to hide. Chris McCandless wanted to be an explorer, but being born in 1968 meant that the world was already all explored. His clever solution, throw away the map. But that didn’t make him an explorer, it made him an idiot who died 5 miles from a bridge that would have saved his life. And I’ll tell you something else that you ain’t dying enough to know Big Casino Sure, you can still spin real records, code for the NES, and SSH into your comma device. But you don’t have to. And that makes the people who do it come from a different distribution from the people who used to. They are not explorers in the same way Chris McCandless wasn’t. When I found out about the singularity at 15, I was sure it was going to happen. It was depressing for a while, realizing that machines would be able to do everything a lot better than I could. But then I realized that it wasn’t like that yet and I could still work on this problem. And here I am, working in AI 20 years later. I thought I came to grips with obsolescence. But it’s not obsolescence, the reality is looking to be so much sadder than I imagined. It won’t be humans accepting the rise of the machines, it won’t be humans fighting the rise of the machines, it will be human shaped zoo animals oddly pacing back and forth in a corner of the cage while the world keeps turning around them. It’s easy to see the appeal of conspiracy theories. Even if they hate you, it’s more comforting to believe that they exist. That at least somebody is driving. But that’s not true. It’s just going. There are no longer Western institutions capable of making sense of the world. (maybe the Chinese ones can? it’s hard to tell) We are shoved up brutally against evolution, just of the memetic variety. The TikTok brainrot kids will be nothing compared to the ChatGPT brainrot kids. And I’m not talking like an old curmudgeon about the new forms of media being bad and the youth being bad like Socrates said. Because you can never go back. It will be whatever it is. To every fool preaching the end of history, evolution spits in your face. To every fool preaching the world government AI singleton, evolution spits in your face. I knew these things intellectually, but viscerally it’s just hard to live through. The world feels so small and I feel like I’m being stared at by the Eye of Sauron.
I always had a diffuse idea of why people are spending so much time and money on amateur radio. Once I got my license and started to amass radios myself, it became more clear.
What does it mean when someone writes that a programming language is “strongly typed”? I’ve known for many years that “strongly typed” is a poorly-defined term. Recently I was prompted on Lobsters to explain why it’s hard to understand what someone means when they use the phrase. I came up with more than five meanings! how strong? The various meanings of “strongly typed” are not clearly yes-or-no. Some developers like to argue that these kinds of integrity checks must be completely perfect or else they are entirely worthless. Charitably (it took me a while to think of a polite way to phrase this), that betrays a lack of engineering maturity. Software engineers, like any engineers, have to create working systems from imperfect materials. To do so, we must understand what guarantees we can rely on, where our mistakes can be caught early, where we need to establish processes to catch mistakes, how we can control the consequences of our mistakes, and how to remediate when somethng breaks because of a mistake that wasn’t caught. strong how? So, what are the ways that a programming language can be strongly or weakly typed? In what ways are real programming languages “mid”? Statically typed as opposed to dynamically typed? Many languages have a mixture of the two, such as run time polymorphism in OO languages (e.g. Java), or gradual type systems for dynamic languages (e.g. TypeScript). Sound static type system? It’s common for static type systems to be deliberately unsound, such as covariant subtyping in arrays or functions (Java, again). Gradual type systems migh have gaping holes for usability reasons (TypeScript, again). And some type systems might be unsound due to bugs. (There are a few of these in Rust.) Unsoundness isn’t a disaster, if a programmer won’t cause it without being aware of the risk. For example: in Lean you can write “sorry” as a kind of “to do” annotation that deliberately breaks soundness; and Idris 2 has type-in-type so it accepts Girard’s paradox. Type safe at run time? Most languages have facilities for deliberately bypassing type safety, with an “unsafe” library module or “unsafe” language features, or things that are harder to spot. It can be more or less difficult to break type safety in ways that the programmer or language designer did not intend. JavaScript and Lua are very safe, treating type safety failures as security vulnerabilities. Java and Rust have controlled unsafety. In C everything is unsafe. Fewer weird implicit coercions? There isn’t a total order here: for instance, C has implicit bool/int coercions, Rust does not; Rust has implicit deref, C does not. There’s a huge range in how much coercions are a convenience or a source of bugs. For example, the PHP and JavaScript == operators are made entirely of WAT, but at least you can use === instead. How fancy is the type system? To what degree can you model properties of your program as types? Is it convenient to parse, not validate? Is the Curry-Howard correspondance something you can put into practice? Or is it only capable of describing the physical layout of data? There are probably other meanings, e.g. I have seen “strongly typed” used to mean that runtime representations are abstract (you can’t see the underlying bytes); or in the past it sometimes meant a language with a heavy type annotation burden (as a mischaracterization of static type checking). how to type So, when you write (with your keyboard) the phrase “strongly typed”, delete it, and come up with a more precise description of what you really mean. The desiderata above are partly overlapping, sometimes partly orthogonal. Some of them you might care about, some of them not. But please try to communicate where you draw the line and how fuzzy your line is.
