Surprisingly many older managers going for it these days. As if they weren't the engineers suffering from this nonsense back when it was popular last time.

So, Generative AI is a stochastic parrot regurgitating the average of all the world’s most mediocre code… Yet, somehow, the “upper elite 1% of talent” is getting massive productivity gains from it? To the point where Elite Performing tech corporations mandate it? That doesn’t add up

I wrote a longer bit on this topic: dorotaparad.ch/aiaiaiaiai/

I keep hearing this claim again and again - microservice architecture comes with extra complexity. Is that really so? dorotaparad.ch/microservice...

When we only reward teams for delivering features or solving problems, we encourage two things: 1) releasing features that don’t matter 2) creation of problems to be solved. If you want reliable software, reward teams when nothing happens. dorotaparad.ch/recognition-...

@british-airways.bsky.social what's up with your booking system? I'm trying to book a flight and both your website and the app throw errors for the second day now, can't complete the process. Are you not selling tickets anymore? Don't you want my money? 🫠

I’ve finally created a home for some of my scribbles: dorotaparad.ch I will fill it out with my past and new articles in the coming weeks and beyond. (1/6)

I have a very simple heuristic: If you and the CEO aren't on first-name speaking terms by the end of your first month, either the company's too big for you to matter, or the CEO thinks it is. Neither's a good omen.

It is so much easier to destroy than to build.

I've said this before: AI is good for raising the floor, not raising the ceiling.

Replacing friends with LLM chatbots would be like replacing missing nutrients with eating your own feces. Even if you're not put off by the idea, you won't get anything that wasn't already chewed and digested.

Look at this beauty I've met on the side of the road

Most folks don't actually want unbiased news. They want news biased in ways that match their existing beliefs while appearing objective to outsiders.

Contrary to the narrative peddled to us by tech bros, the AI is not going to cause a revolution or bring huge breakthroughs. The value of AI is not in raising the ceiling, it's in raising the floor. Slow and boring. And doesn't make money.

If your talent acquisition system doesn’t have a way to recognize that it under-leveled someone after hire (and correct it!), you’ll inevitably build a pipeline that incentivizes identifying “hidden” talent to exploit

If you're hiring in tech, read this thread. The whole thing. And then read it again.

Even as feminists, it takes conscious work not to give greater weight to the opinions of men. We've spent our lives absorbing untrue messaging that men are more serious and trustworthy.

Our Coop Wülflingen is not a bodega, that's why our cat is on sale.

No documentation is superior to wrong documentation.

Great, we're back to spheres of control and imperialism all over again. GG, humanity.

You're looking at three golden tortoise beetles (Charidotella sexpunctata). They're native to the Americas, generally the east coast of North America all the way down to Argentina. The gold coloration is structural, semi-reflective layers in the cuticle selectively reflect wavelengths of light.

You can't replace thinking with tooling. AI is just another tool so if you call yourself an engineer, don't expect it to do your work for you. I love how Birgitta Böckeler describes the benefits and pitfalls for software work: martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

You want to see an octopus riding a shark. 🎥: University of Auckland www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/s...

What if Rust is my natural language?

When people design their orgs they like to put roles into sharp boxes where everything fits, nice and tidy. But the real world is messy. Dysfunction emerges where clean boxes collide with organic reality. Hence we reorg and reorg, ad infinitum. You can never solve this problem in a clean way.

I really need people to figure out how to receive information in ways that don't exclusively confirm their priors.

When a technology becomes a financial instrument, innovation stops. Keep this in mind if you think the AI is going to "get better".

Your source code is not that special. Let's face it, you're just cobbling together libraries and copy/pasting someone else's code most of the time.

So I did a thing. I gave my first keynote at DevOps Days Zurich today, and I heard it didn't suck 😅 #DevOpsDaysZH #dodzh #DevOpsDays

BP shuns renewables in return to oil and gas: www.bbc.com/news/article...

A while back I gave a talk on the tension between software security and developer productivity. @benlinders.bsky.social just published an awesome summary at @infoq.com: www.infoq.com/news/2025/02...

This is masterful www.jmspae.se/write-ups/ke...

More spring flowers, because I'm really happy they keep doing this every year.

If you repeat a word enough times, it becomes its own Thing. And then you can sell The Thing instead of selling a solution to a particular problem, which is much harder to do.

Repeat after me: estimating is not measuring.

Spring is coming!

A historic event will take place later this week: on 8 February, the Baltic states will officially leave the Russian-fed power grid and will synchronize with the grid of Continental Europe. Congratulations to the great geostrategist Putin.

To those outside of the current circus who don't want to get overwhelmed by too much of it: this little bot doesn't fix everything, but sure helps bsky.app/profile/uspo...

But did you know that elk dance in puddles in the woods when we’re not watching? 🤩 🔊 🎥 DanMaxwell

People think of mindset as this fuzzy, nebulous thing. Mistake. Mindset is the way you approach problems, a set of defaults, your algorithm for dealing with situations. It’s a very concrete thing and, like the software you’re using, it’s also programmable.

I've been thinking about the paradox of tolerance a lot lately and this story captures it well (🧵)

I'm here now, not that it matters.