Is it Excitement, or Dread?
The times are changing, and fast. Just a month ago I wrote about my skepticism, maybe even pessimism, about AI coding tools. My conclusion was that AI was a force multiplier for both good and bad, and with worries about an incoming "slopacalypse". I would characterize my feelings…
Skeptic to Believer, and Back
My conclusion has been that AI tools are force multipliers. But just think about the skill of the average person. Think about the quality of average, publicly-available code. The average force is close to zero or even negative.…
Code as an Asset and Liability
Every line of code is a bet that it will provide more business value than it will cause maintenance burden and cognitive load on future engineers…
AI Will Take My Job
The robots are coming for my job, and I want them to take it…
Giving ORMs a chance
When you have to store and retrieve data from a database, do you choose to execute SQL statements yourself or do you use an object-relational mapper (ORM) to abstract away those calls completely? My answer to that question has been "SQL, obviously" my entire career; ORMs have…
Help Your Database Help Itself
The database is often the only stateful portion of a service. As such, software engineers rely on it for everything that asks "what did I say about this last time?" or "can you hold this for the next time I'm here?" Modern relational databases…