I'm still writing code the hard way. I'm slow. I like to think critically about every line of code and fiddle with variable names until everything looks right. I treat code as a liability and try to ship only what's necessary.
It's hard to imagine writing code any other way.
I think the long term productivity impacts of AI on the tech industry will be comparable to ruby on rails
My pick is year of resilience. How are we going to adapt to the constant change of pushing all the things into prod as fast as possible
If 2025 was the year of vibe coding, 2026 will be the year of vibe maintenance and security.
I definitely get "less engagement" here than I did on Twitter - fewer followers smaller tech circles, etc.
I don't think that's the worst thing in the world
Anyways, my PTO for the rest of the year starts Wednesday at 5pm and I'm stoked to make cookies and play video games
debugging code that looks like it was written by an LLM isn’t fun, but at least you’re not debugging code that looks like it was written by bob martin
AI will make it worse, not better, to hold blame aware retrospectives.
My friend
@arnieniekamp.bsky.social has a cool limited series podcast about Christmas songs that I think you’d enjoy if you’re looking for some holiday cheer!
art19.com/shows/no-ski...
No Skip Christmas
Building the perfect Christmas playlist episode by episode. Musicians, comedians and podcasters recommend songs and Arnie Niekamp (Hello from the Magic Tavern, Jackbox Games) decides if they're added ...
Imagine this being the case and then you say "FUCK IT, we're making Zelda" and single-handedly saving video games.
(Yes, it's not single-handedly, but it sounds fun)
In the early 1980s, the North American video game market became saturated with consoles and low-quality titles, eroding consumer confidence. Home video game revenue fell from billions in 1983 to mere millions by 1985. 🧵⬇️ (1/4)
Small Town Titans - "You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch" - Official Video
YouTube video by Small Town Titans
An incident is an opportunity to learn and reorient how you navigate a tradeoff space, and the desire to wall them off as a disjoint/irrelevant side-effect of development you shouldn't spend time thinking about can do major disservices to organizations. But is desirable for entrenched structures.
We’re discussing this classic today. The
#PapersInSystems community is a lovely community to have a focused conversation with — the discussions draw on so much experience, and draw in connections to other work.
Measuring your organization's reliability by counting incidents or averaging their length is like measuring your company's value by how many emails the sales team sends, and how many words on average they contain.
#resilience #NoMTTRHad the fun of being a guest on the This is Fine! podcast last week.
Hot take - I don't think you ever *really* put an incident "on hold", not fully. Does that still have value?
Give it a listen!
youtu.be/qh0Wy3uB0yw
Incident Status: On Hold w/special guest Will Gallego
YouTube video by thisisfinepodcast
Spent my Thanksgiving playing with public incident data and seeing if it was under statistical control.
surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/11/27/f...
Fun with incident data and statistical process control
Last year, I wrote a post called TTR: the out-of-control metric. In that post, I argued that the incident response process(in particular, the time-to-resolution metric for incidents) will never be …
Give me the assignment and I don't miss.
Clockwise from top right:
- Caramel apple pie
- Two pumpkin pies
- Two banana cream pies
- Blueberry pie
- A Milk Bar inspired pie in the middle
The pie baking has commenced.
Aiming for six pies this year.
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Hey fellow software engineers of the interwebs, we have an out!
Just me at 2am reading apple pie recipes in prep for Thanksgiving
I keep hearing "Well, you can't put the genie back in the bottle..." wrt AI from the same people who are promoting it so hard.
If it's so great, why would you *want* to? Isn't that an aphorism for something destructive, or at least negatively impactful?
Also, I just don't agree with the premise.
Don't worry, as a resident of NYC suburbs we're not putting up with the bullshit from people who threaten to leave with Mamdani's win either.
Congrats New York, wish I was still living there to celebrate.
Okay now that he’s conceded, it’s time for Curtis Sliwa to hang upside down by his feet like a bat for three years or whatever he does between elections.
The whole "Should millionaires be subsidized to ride the bus/have free child care?" debate is so wildly ridiculous.
If public schools didn't exist, the same argument would be used there. "Why should the rich get free education!?"
I'm not sure you can get more marie antoinette than taking away food stamps before thanksgiving while you build a gold and marble dance hall so the other crooks can bring bribe you over a badly-cooked (argentinian) steak
The number of people who didn’t know what us-east-1 was on Sunday and are suddenly experts in running multi-region distributed systems at scale today is truly remarkable.
At Etsy, we had an upgrade go out for MySQL with Chef. Meant to go to one server, instead upgraded all of production. During that time, it had to update very tall tables, which mean locking them from any reads or writes. Turned into a multi-hour downtime where we just had to wait for it to finish.
Man, I forgot about MF Doom, shame on me. So good.
"It's a tremendous amount of work to solve problems you're creating".
Heard this used to describe film making but man, could that ever apply to software engineering too.
I guess now is a great time to get bad opinions out there.
I think Final Fantasy IV (II in the US) for the SNES is at best a mediocre game. Characters are barely one dimensional, the storyline is boring, combat is super tedious and the sprite work isn't anything to write home about.
Software incidents are painful, and we're trying to help change that. If you deal with incidents in your work, please help us help you!
Take the survey here:
www.thevoid.community/survey
VOID Survey
The VOID is a community-contributed collection of software-related incident reports.
The culture of working in tech these days is being constantly worried about being overworked or unemployed.
Take care of yourselves. We are replaceable cogs to our employers but irreplaceable to our family and friends.
Re-upping this again, please spread far and wide:
"Will, write the scariest monster for your D&D game"
*Points at Hazel*
Have you learned about my favorite character prank, the Greek question mark?
It looks identical to a semicolon. Just sprinkle it into a C codebase and have fun
#define ; ;
I'm actually kind of a pacifist...
*reads*
Oh you better throw some fucking hands at that.
they asked what George Lucas film was #1 in 1977 and he said "Star Wars" and they said it was actually Star Wars IV A New Hope
Hey, we're going to play some D&D!!
The party is battling The Old Man of the Forest - the Metsavana - a monstrous corpse eating creature keeping them trapped within this small oasis within the dark woods.
Come hang out!
www.twitch.tv/wcgallego/
wcgallego - Twitch
wcgallego streams live on Twitch! Check out their videos, sign up to chat, and join their community.
and I am trying to think of how to explain to this man that I literally DO NOT KNOW HOW to not smile when an exercise hurts
and he was like, “fucking ballerinas, man, every one of them is the fucking Terminator”
and it was the most validating thing anyone has ever said about me
The search for work continues!
- Podcast Editing
- Sound Design
- TTRPG Design
- TTRPG Editing
- Project Coordination
Those are the things I'm best at/want to do the most.
Please boost and share! Rates will follow.
🐈⬛🤍
When Github is having its weekly failure but the Github status page says "All Systems Operational"
AI in software development feels like we wished on a monkeys paw. "Man, there's so much new stuff every day. I wish we could focus on just *one* for a while..."
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I loooooved chatting with my good friend
@ellaceron.bsky.social about writing for her newsletter! Here’s a brief excerpt of me being a real AI hater. Read the whole interview:
open.substack.com/pub/ellacero...YouTube has gone so very unhinged with ads. I'm getting two ads (the first 15 seconds and unskippable, and then a 30 second skippable after 5 seconds) every 5 minutes while watching some videos.
Completely untenable.
It’s not you; it’s not a personal flaw!!
New York City Companies All but Stopped Hiring in First Half of the Year
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/n...
New York City Companies All but Stopped Hiring in First Half of the Year
It costs less to fucking SHARE of EVERYONE DOES IT
“In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back into a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.”
It costs a lot less to house people.
Finland ends homelessness and provides shelter for all in need - scoop.me
In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Why? The country applies the "Housing First" concept agains homelessness.
When I hear people trash talking DC over absolutely nothing, it makes me think of this absolutely brilliant sketch from
@brennanleemulligan.bsky.social & crew
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNpo...
Don't Trash Talk New York | Hardly Working
YouTube video by Dropout
"I went there once...and there was a trash on the ground..."
"A whole trash!?"
"Everyone's so drunk and angry!"
"...That's true but those people aren't NYers, they're from Long Island."
Having been born and raised on LI, this is true.
[This post could not be retrieved]
I think I need to play a little frog man in a TTRPG
"Hey Will, didn't you say you were going to post more about tech and stuff?"
Yeah well sometimes the heart wants what it wants
Sam, I love you and I love Dropout, but cmon.
We're not linking to, ya know...
if you’re still in line, stay in line 🫡
x.com/GameChanger...
Holy shit this goes hard
[This post could not be retrieved]
Thanks Ben!
A reminder that Elephant Shrews are the best
Related, wow this is one of the most beautiful mammals I've ever seen
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rh...
I love this because any NYer worth their salt (so, not Cuomo) would call it the LIE
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Anyone else wince when compiling their code?
...Just me?
Stickers, pins, and iron-on patches are all now available for my queer Game Changer designs! Thank you so much to
@samreich.bsky.social &
@dropout.tv for the kind permission to make and sell these! Every sale really helps with my own trans expenses and creating more queer art 🏳️⚧️
canopyrobin.etsy.com
