Btw, I think calling it “crafting” instead of “hacking” is such a delightful subversion Willing to bet that’s a big part of why we got such a varied group

Perhaps it’s time to balance out the distilled dose of present-day SF, with its many beauties and horrors, by revisiting Joan Didion’s Where I Was From

This was a joy yesterday, I'm still buzzing from it! A non-exhaustive list of cool things that happened (anonymized, of course): - folks from many experience levels showed up - we talked about our feelings, and we all felt pretty anxious and overwhelmed in this moment - we got to crafting

2 different people today told me how lonely and in need of connection everyone is right now

Tfw you show up in SF to run a very different kind of AI event and a lot of people are ready for something different 🤔

Pro tip: only maintain friendships with people your childhood self would have felt safe and happy with

Every child is everyone's responsibility www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Petition to rename Large Language Models to Gestalt Slurpers

Dear fellow humans of the Northern Hemisphere, If you look outside at 4:35pm, there’s a good chance it’s no longer pitch black. We’re really doing it y’all!

Them, fifteen years ago: “Give her a community manager job. She’ll serve beer at conferences. It’ll be great.” Me: “I will reverse engineer the basis of human motivation and knowledge-sharing in computing contexts from first principles.“

Also I think a bunch about how the lone genius frame of software convinces us this is the only way to succeed, so everyone is jamming their brain around trying to do the impossible in isolation, when a social frame means we can actually scaffold what each other knows

Sue has made me so much smarter about this era of tech. Excited that everyone else gets to benefit now too!

How much trouble is made and gotten into online because some very personal (and real!) subjective phenomena that lives inside one person is assumed to be generalizable, and they go around in circles trying to force that schema onto other people, getting mad at others when it doesn’t work?

Because here’s the thing: we become dedicated to software tools that give us results. And once a tool has delivered enough superpowers, there’s a sort of escape velocity to how we regard them. Everything else that shows up needs to compete with the wins you’re already busy racking up

Working with Claude Code the other day, I was reflecting on how defensible their position is. And I think they’ve made a strong one for themselves by serving a developer constituency incredibly well.

It’s so important to understand this

This is truth incarnate, and I despise it

Bombast and assuredness are rewarded in tech culture, but one of the fastest ways for someone to gain my trust is to say “I don’t know” Like, give me gradations of certainty over feigned bravado any damn day

There are so many awful externalities we have to deal with from LLMs but more people being able to to build software can be hugely democratizing if we craft products to help users learn to work with the code they produce.

“Bad tooling as a cause and function of bad culture”

*me, driving* Ah yes, just going to take a moment to be attuned to the other scared, squishy little meat ghosts hiding inside of 1 ton rolling metal death machines so that none of us does anything too stupid.

Anyone want to go do a Friday night before Christmas Costco run just to feel something?

*confronted with a vast world full of more beauty than i could ever conceive of* guess i’ll yell at people about linux online

Okay but super weird question How much of the terseness we encourage in software development was encoded in earlier days of computing when “computer user” was a tiny, specialized group?

Expanding the definition of “developer” as you go is the biggest dev tools growth move there is Most folks would rather code harder than figure out how to play that game

Shoutout to that time at a Stack Overflow offsite an engineer stood up and said: “There’s no politics here. We just look at the data and decide.” Grade A telling on yourself. Such an efficient way to transmit that politics are on your side.

This is inconvenient information, but there is not one kind of AI/ML technology that only does the good use cases and a different kind of AI/ML that only does the bad use cases

Some speaker joy as we look back at 2025 and plan for public speaking in 2026! My inbox is now open for '26 events that need empathy + evidence + psychology for technologists 👀

I’ve had seniors in my life ask me to explain real quick why voting with our feet doesn’t work the same with FB or Amazon And since none of them have been able to bankroll me spending ~5 years dissecting networked capitalism I have to share what I can in tiny pockets and send them on their way 😔

When I encounter myself as a different colored cursor because I have the Google Doc open in two tabs

It’s super funny how in the Northern Hemisphere we probably have six good, functional hours a day right now and we’re expected to just carry on like normal. Absolutely absurd.

Software development revealing how we think about people’s minds is the entire reason I’ve ever given a damn about it. People have made me feel like I’m delusional for this, but I think they’re the ones missing the plot.

Refusing to turn on each other is a huge part of how we get out of this

And you know what? I find folks say they’re discarding because it’s squishy, but it’s actually because it’s scary.

Thinking is invisible labor. Collaboration is invisible labor

This is one of my favorite things to wonder. It’s as if software is also a place, and our experience of that place is collaboratively negotiated, and our behaviors are in part determined by its design. 😜

“use cases haven't actually been defined prior to selling it”

Metrics are always the result of important, harder to measure things about people’s experience that are driving behavior. The numbers can be useful, but they’re never the whole story. The map is not the terrain.

Every codebase is an emergent communal reality and a reflection of our relationships, codified in behavior you can run an infinite number of times. Wondering if we might consider wising up to this?

I think the single most important skill you can have online right now is being able to ask the question “is this person a journalist or a content creator” and then knowing what to do with that difference

This is one of the most important questions of our time, and tangling with it requires an almost scary amount of imagination and hope. I’ve been working to nurture, clarify, and sustain this frame for fifteen years. I know how much it asks people to let go of.

“Software as a medium of becoming” is a really beautiful phrase. It describes the work I aspire to.

I’ve done research interviews with eng & product leaders whose teams work with large quantities of agent-generated code. Can confirm that tooling, practices, or some combination thereof are deeply necessary in a new world where LOC are shockingly cheap to produce.

Halsey’s collaboration with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is the best Halloween album ever made Do not @ me

Next time someone asks me if I’m technical I should just say: “I don’t know. Are you?”

keeping it in the group chat

I’ve fallen in love with Becky Chambers’ work this year and have very nearly chewed through every book there is. If I’m a fan of Chambers, what do I read next? I am about to enter withdrawal, please send help.

It’s not that Stack Overflow originated the idea that some of us have special programmer brains and others don’t it's just that we gamified the performance of it.

Nothing like thumbing through fifteen years of hard-won lessons in a field no one’s wanted to take seriously so they can be distilled down into useful advice for folks without the same experience to make me question my very will to live. (I’m fine, I’m fine. But hahaha jfc)

I can appreciate irreverence, but also, sometimes it’s a gateway drug to nihilism.