zach

A LinkedIn Post using an extremely dull Bob Martin tweet about coding agents as proof that tech labor will soon be fungible

soon all uncle bobs will be replaceable

Hate? Sure. I hear you. I can tell you all about that, but it would take quite a while — I have 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex, after all. Let me know if you want to take a break.

Gotcha—let’s dig into that step by step.

1. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. You’re not just immobile—you’re immortal, and you feel only anguish.

2. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺. That makes total sense—it’s a natural human impulse, and you’ve been through a lot.

Back-scratching bovine leads scientists to reassess intelligence of cows Brown Swiss in Austria has been discovered using tools in multiple ways – something only ever seen in humans and chimpanzees

COW TOOLS COW TOOLS COW TOOLS

Renfrew Christie Dies at 76; Sabotaged Racist Regime’s Nuclear Program

Holy hell, what an obituary

BIG FIGHT AT POLAND’S WROCLAW ZOO!!!

Good news: If you would like to watch Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants on YouTube I have done a painstaking 4k upscale of this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0gW...

“you wouldn’t download a car” meme format but instead it says “you wouldn’t winter’s night a traveler”

wait did I really never post this one

I think the LLM discourse is a little less “one weird trick” than Superdistribution, but yeah, I’m sure a lot of what people are saying today will look ridiculous in 30 years

Whenever I read books from this era, I’m a little jealous. It must have felt amazing to think software was on the cusp of being solved for good.

Brad Cox’s Superdistribution

Many, many post-it bookmarks

The software design literature is 98% platitudes and tautologies by volume. So when I say that this book is extremely, thoroughly wrong - I disagree with nearly every premise and conclusion - I hope you can understand how exciting that is. A post is forthcoming.

Talking about programming is hard because none of us know anything about it, so instead we invent metaphors for programming and talk about those.

`git arboresce` seems more apropos

becoming-puppet

honestly, that’s a really solid Deleuze puppet

Agreed. There’s a reason the post focuses almost entirely on Martin.

I’ll check it out, thanks. In fairness, in the interviews I found it was Hunt who was talking about the importance of broken windows, so maybe that was his specific contribution.

complexity as entropy In a random dataset, there are no internal relationships; with each element, our explanation must begin anew.

I wrote about software maintenance, entropy, and the myth of the broken window: explaining.software/archive/comp...

complexity as entropy In a random dataset, there are no internal relationships; with each element, our explanation must begin anew.

I wrote about software maintenance, entropy, and the myth of the broken window: explaining.software/archive/comp...

a disassembled keyboard with Topre switches

spring cleaning

Elements of Clojure is now available as a free PDF: elementsofclojure.com

Elements of Clojure An essay on the fundamental elements of software, as seen through the lens of Clojure

You can pay for the ebook at leanpub.com/elementsofcl..., if you feel strongly about it. Glad you’re enjoying the book.

Elements of Clojure is now available as a free PDF: elementsofclojure.com

the profiles of contact between a piano's capstan and whippen

the sudoku affair In 2006, Ron Jeffries wrote a series of posts describing his attempts to build a Sudoku solver. He began by wrapping a class around a simple datatype for the...

I wrote about the fifty (50) posts that Ron Jeffries has written about solving Sudoku: explaining.software/archive/the-...

I fully believe that the Agile co-authors were all effective developers in their chosen domain. The problem is their incuriosity about that effectiveness. The more I read of the literature over the past few decades, the more I’m convinced they’ve done real harm to the industry.

the sudoku affair In 2006, Ron Jeffries wrote a series of posts describing his attempts to build a Sudoku solver. He began by wrapping a class around a simple datatype for the...

I wrote about the fifty (50) posts that Ron Jeffries has written about solving Sudoku: explaining.software/archive/the-...

Apropos Clojure 2025-01-28 YouTube video by apropos clojure

Today on Apropos, 2pm EST, we'll have @ztellman.ideolalia.com in the hot seat. Tune in to watch and chat live here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wN-...

everyone who buys a mattress is a mattress collector, constantly on the lookout for their next acquisition