Write about what you learn. It pushes you to understand topics better. Sometimes the gaps in your knowledge only become clear when you try explaining things to others. It’s OK if no one reads what you write. You get a lot out of just doing it for you.
Lots of good advice from Addy:
Saying no is better than overcommitting.
If only all thinkpieces on complexity in software development were written in such an entertaining style! (Although, admittedly, that would get very old very fast.)
A layman’s guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained
This was a really fun podcast chat—nice and snappy at just 20 minutes.
Like Michael Pollan’s food rules, but for JavaScript:
- Plan your scripts out on paper.
- Stop obsessing over tools.
- Focus on solving problems.
- Maintain a library of snippets that you can reuse.
Here’s what the “AI will replace developers” crowd fundamentally misunderstands: code is not an asset—it’s a liability. Every line must be maintained, debugged, secured, and eventually replaced. The real asset is the business capability that code enables.
If AI makes writing code faster and cheaper, it’s really making it easier to create liability. When you can generate liability at unprecedented speed, the ability to manage and minimize that liability strategically becomes exponentially more valuable.
This is particularly true because AI excels at local optimization but fails at global design. It can optimize individual functions but can’t determine whether a service should exist in the first place, or how it should interact with the broader system. When implementation speed increases dramatically, architectural mistakes get baked in before you realize they’re mistakes.
Here’s the main problem I’ve found with generative AI, and with “vibe coding” in general: it completely sucks out the joy of software development for me.
I hate the way they’ve taken over the software industry, I hate how they make me feel while I’m using them, and I hate the human-intelligence-insulting postulation that a glorified Excel spreadsheet can do what I can but better.
Take my job. Please.
Two JavaScript frameworks—Svelte and Astro—share a philosophy, but take subtly different approaches.
…of the T-shirt.