Last week Thoughtworks released the 34th volume of our Technology Radar. This radar is our biannual survey of our experience of the technology scene, highlighting tools, techniques, platforms, and lan

I attended the first Pragmatic Summit early this year, and while there host Gergely Orosz interviewed Kent Beck and myself on stage. The video runs for about half-an-hour. I always enjoy nattering wi

Last night I saw Central Square Theater’s excellent production of Breaking the Code. It’s about Alan Turing, who made a monumental contribution to both my profession and the fate of free democracies.

I mostly link to written material here, but I’ve recently listened to two excellent podcasts that I can recommend. Anyone who regularly reads these fragments knows that I’m a big fan of Simon Willison

Rahul Garg finishes his series on reducing the friction in AI-Assisted Development. He proposes a structured feedback practice that harvests learnings from AI sessions and feeds them

Modern hardware is remarkably fast, but software often fails to leverage it. Caer Sanders has found it valuable to guide his work with mechanical sympathy - the practice of creating

As we see LLMs churn out scads of code, folks have increasingly turned to Cognitive Debt as a metaphor for capturing how a team can lose understanding of what a system does. Margaret-Anne Storey think

Last month Birgitta Böckeler wrote some initial thoughts about the recently developed notion of Harness Engineering. She's been researching and thinking more about this in the weeks since

AI coding assistants respond to whoever is prompting, and the quality of what they produce depends on how well the prompter articulates team standards. Rahul Garg proposes treating the ins

Anthropic carried a study, done by getting its model to interview some 80,000 users to understand their opinions about AI, what they hope from it, and what they fear. Two things stood out to me. It’s

An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a short document that captures and explains a single decision relevant to a product or ecosystem. Documents should be short, just a couple of pages, and co

David Poll points out the flawed premise of the argument that code review is a bottleneck To be fair, finding defects has always been listed as a goal of code review – Wikipedia will tell you as much.

Conversations with AI are ephemeral, decisions made early lose attention as the conversation continues, and disappear entirely with a new session. Rahul Garg explains how Context Anc

Annie Vella did some research into how 158 professional software engineers used AI, her first question was: Are AI tools shifting where engineers actually spend their time and effort? Because if they

Tech firm fined $1.1m by California for selling high-school students’ data I agree with Brian Marick’s response No such story should be published without a comparison of the fine to the company’s prev

Naresh Jain has long been uncomfortable with software patents. But a direct experience of patent aggression, together with the practical constraints faced by startups, led him to resort to

There's been much talk recently about how AI agents affect the workflow loops of software development. Kief Morris believes the answer is to focus on the goal of turning ideas into outcome

Rahul Garg continues his series of Patterns for Reducing Friction in AI-Assisted Development. This pattern describes a structured conversation that mirrors whiteboarding with a human pair:

I don’t tend to post links to videos here, as I can’t stand watching videos to learn about things. But some talks are worth a watch, and I do suggest this overview on how organizations are currently u

Rahul Garg has observed a frustration loop when working with AI coding assistants - lots of code generated, but needs lots of fixing. He's noticed five patterns that help improve the