These are all the habits I use fwiw. + I try to ensure I am reading at minimum 10-20% work led by grad students/early career/fresh voices; you avoid the calcification and sanded-off edges and get much fresher, bolder ideas that way

I got comms training a couple years ago, which developer advocates do not commonly have. This drama is a REAL good argument for making that mandatory for your teams lmao

quite the opposite really. Orgs should be seeing AI as a highly heterogenous set of individual experiments; even if you HAD good "productivity" measurements before I wouldn't trust them without a thorough re-examination of their operationalization now

In a very rare happenstance, some cancellations happened and I'm now going to be speaking at Platform Day at KubeCon EU! My talk will be on building extensible platforms. Given that I'm *also* speaking at QCon London, my March is about to be a lot busier. I'm excited!

[lowtax speedrun: the country]

If any time was a good time to argue that energy security comes from renewables, now would be that time... 25% of production blockaded is a hell of a price shock.

I try to use “straightforward” instead of trivial, and I’ll often throw in “…but not necessarily easy, obvious, or intuitive” But yeah. Being in math brain for so long makes it really easy for me to forget how off putting certain phrases are!

Poll: should “reaction emojis” (which are called reactji, apparently??) be considered a valid form of email, and should your email client let you send react-o-mail? Like = fuck no Repost = absolutely fuck not

Attention: I have hit inbox zero on every work and personal email Please clap, it took me hours 😭

I continue to be fascinated by the phenomenon whereby an expert engages with any of the LLMs on their field of expertise and is instantly horrified by the wrong answers, and then goes on to use it for things they are not experts in as though it won’t be just as bad for those.

I whipped up another learning related Skill! Smaller than Learning Opportunities, but very complementary: interactive guidance through a quick research-backed psychological intervention that helps improve learning plans, motivation and commitment

 github.com/DrCatHicks/l...

We are going to see A LOT OF THIS kind of thing

This is the kinda room where little jack sits down at the desk and writes All linoleum and butter colour makes jack a dull boy All linoleum and butter colour makes jack a dull boy All linoleum and butter colour makes jack a dull boy All linoleum and butter colour makes jack a dull boy All linoleum—

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS. not just in communities, but companies too. I have never in my long career worked with anyone who deliberately *made the choice* to be a “low performer” without curiosity/discipline/agency, it’s always been beaten out of them

This is really profound. Communities have to become self-regulating healthy groups, and in a technical context where healthy communities aren't encouraged, you really need to be a counter-culture force to do this. People do it, but it would be a lot easier if we valued it a lot more

I would echo this. I *have* found people "without" discipline and curiosity, but usually this is correlated with: 1. They've been shut down and shut out 2. They don't feel valued 3. They've been stripped of self efficacy 4. They don't feel safe in their environment So, y'know... I can't blame them

I never knew how ridiculous you could get with placing accents until I met my partner I swear she can pin anyone in the Netherlands based on their accent to a practically fuckin 5km circle. She’s like the geo guesser but with Dutch accents Absolutely bonkers. Human linguistic evolution is so cool

I am preparing to write an article on how I think about developer productivity and I have written an outline that is extremely Hazel length Why am I incapable of writing normal sized articles?

This paper started as an exchange here in late 2024 and evolved over the next year into a tidy set of recommendations for labs hoping to build more collaborative coding communities. 🎉 Would love to hear if any of these (really not so "simple") rules resonate with you, and what else you've tried.

~ everything is metacognition ~

I think at the end of the day if software engineers felt that software engineering skill assessment hiring practices were incredibly good and everyone loved them, I'd pay just a bit more attention to how software experts are arguing that aptitude and potential should be evaluated.

This came up a bit over the past week in conversations here, but the way that fixating on short-term productivity in technical work SEEMS good but can actually harm us, is something I've been working on for years. The fourth chapter of my book is on this paradox! *waits impatiently for release*

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus. FOSS nerds: the Torment Nexus cannot be ethical until it is Open Source

I’ve been talking about Alysa Liu’s story about her quitting skating only to come back and become even better because she did it for herself and this came to me in a dream…

The best life hack I ever gave myself was making the password for my parents’ WiFi “easytoremember” Countless times have I sat there and thought “now what the fuck was that password. I thought for sure I made it easy to re… ohhh right. Clever girl.”

Currently watching the goodest boy service doggo steal a snack on the train floor as a self reward for his good behaviour Owner? Not impressed. Much scolding But by the tail wags and guilty look on his face I can tell he has ✨ zero ✨ regrets

Don’t worry if those result look questionable, I meta science analysed this study using PLS-SEM and found two major clusters: “people who think I’m right” and “a bunch of whiny losers” So ✨ empirically ✨ I can conclude, therefore, definitively, with experimental evidence, that I am very smart

Me, every time I am presented with something I disagree with:

Watching sci fi movies can be entertaining sometimes because what do you mean this giant fucking ship the size of a small country has a single point of failure that can be destroyed by a small dedicated person? Like pffh a vibe coded todo list app has better resilience than that ??

The two hardest problems in Computer Science are 1. Human communication 2. Getting people in tech to believe that human communication is important

Transcendent.

The post-it note would've fiscally outperformed by a significant margin, tbh ✅ Don't need a new team to implement a failing pilot ✅ Skip the massive procurement spend ✅ No AI powered CVE generator ✅ When your execs get yanked by the board for shirking AI, the replacements can be cheaper ✨ profit ✨

"If they're complaining you haven't done it, it's a bug; if they're complaining you're going to do it, it's a feature." oh this one is accurate accurate

It’s fully automated infrastructure as code!* * curl, shell scripts, magic strings, and pain

Society: *sobbing* you can’t just make everyone a knowledge worker Me: *points at anyone using metacognition and cognitive scaffolding* knowledge worker

Once, technology solved problems. People liked having problems solved, so they liked technology. Tech execs started to think of that sentiment as their due. So when they stopped solving problems, and people stopped liking them, they became outraged. "How dare you not love whatever we give you?"

Seeing people use this to experiment w/turning Claude time from automated lecture into active learning & self-testing has brought me joy! I added a Measure This resource to the repo, because my first thought was: how can you all get more credit for this at work?? github.com/DrCatHicks/l...

New Newsletter: Stream of Consciousness Development, about a super useful pairing technique I discovered last week buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

The ADHD ability to make hard stuff look easy so people think you're being ridiculous when you struggle with easy stuff is my favorite part.

I'm going to piggyback off of Cat's excellent answer here to (paraphrased) "how big can one's area of expertise reasonably be" I've become known for "knowing a lot about a lot". People have joked about me being an expert on *too many* things, many times :) So, here's one way I grow that expertise

After carefully reading and ranking a record number of 185 submissions from 148 speakers, we finally finished the talk selection for RustWeek 2026! I'm *really* excited about the lineup! Check it out here: 2026.rustweek.org/blog/2026-02... Don't forget to buy your ticket! See you in Utrecht!

Key to efficient learning is realizing how we ACTUALLY learn, not just what FEELS like learning. I wrote a Claude Skill for some friends to help them think about this and they've liked it -- see Principles for some directions you could explore github.com/DrCatHicks/l...

Yes. One thing every scientist should probably learn is that falsification can't escape the Quine-Duhem problem. In this case, if your toy statistical model of science predicts one thing, and you see another, you can't tell whether you refuted your hypothesis or your model is wrong.

I had a conversation today about documentation with someone and it was lovely. One of the questions we chatted about was “how to use AI effectively” Well… here’s a good example of how *not* to

Catch me on the main stage at RustWeek for the first time! I’ll be speaking on programming languages as a community of belonging, how our perception of what being a programmer has changed over time, and what that means for our communities in the future

dealing with the public is one of the most fascinating things you can do. woe be to the "founder" who isolates themselves from sales, support & service.

In lieu of being able to clone me, you can have a longer download from me and from @analog-ashley.bsky.social as we march straight into hell (talking about whether people can learn in the AI era and how we're trying to show up for our communities on this) www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/epis...

You can't miss this one neither hype, nor doom a rigorous analysis from working experts in the age of LLMs, all about how to use these tools for learning and meeting your goals go beyond the sugar rush of agents and see the lasting leverage

Has our brain tried a GC collection algorithm that doesn’t have a stop the world mark and sweep phase? Could be interesting. Hmu, biology, I’d like less sleep pauses please

I remember when we were 12-18 months out from AI white collar job automation, 12-18 months ago.