Every Dependency Is Technical Debt
Dependencies are liabilities, not assets. From left-pad breaking the internet to Log4j's endemic vulnerability, every package you add expands your attack surface and maintenance burden....
Hard-won lessons from 45+ years in the trenches.
No optimism theater What actually works
Dependencies are liabilities, not assets. From left-pad breaking the internet to Log4j's endemic vulnerability, every package you add expands your attack surface and maintenance burden....
Current AI agents don't learn - they retrieve. New research on reinforcement learning for memory could change that. Understanding why your AI agent keeps making the same mistakes....
Why premature optimization wastes developer time. The economics of knowing when code is good enough and when performance actually matters....
The panic over AI image generation misses how it's actually helping working artists be more productive and creative....
The traits that high-performing engineering teams share have nothing to do with methodology certifications. Small teams, clear ownership, direct communication, and outcome focus....
The pattern behind production outages: the 2am alert, the escalating panic, the decision that makes it worse. What separates teams that recover from teams that don't....
European AI funding doubled in 2025. But 90% of startups fail and 95% of AI pilots never deliver ROI. What the funding headlines don't tell you....
I built Web Spy - a desktop app that crawled and cached websites for offline reading. This was before HTTrack, before Pocket, before Instapaper. Never shipped it....
Dog-eared, coffee-stained, held together by stubbornness and nostalgia. The programming books from the late 1970s that started a 45-year journey in technology....
Technical co-founders face unique pressures: irreversible architecture decisions, constant translation duty, recognition gaps, and always-on responsibility. 54% of founders burned out last year - for ...
Documentation quality determines adoption more than feature completeness. Tom Preston-Werner's Readme Driven Development and the open source community show how doc-first thinking produces better softw...
Solo founders face psychological costs the startup world rarely acknowledges. The isolation isn't weakness—it's physics....

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