programmer, general partner @blueyard, author of upcoming book Regenerative Software. prev @wunderlist, @microsoft, @rubycentral, @rubyconf @railsconf
New York, USA
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I'm excited to share the early access release of my upcoming book, Regenerative Software, which will be released in full early next year by O'Reilly, one of my all time favorite tech publishers! As a self-taught developer, I learned a lot of what was foundational to my career from early O'Reilly books on UNIX, Perl, sed, awk, etc. Thrilled to finally have one of these animal covers with my name on it. (link in thread)
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chad fowler retweeted
Had a wonderful chat with @GergelyOrosz - always nice to go deep on ideas in a proper long chat. Got to show off some notebook sketches and design jigs with agents too.
What can us, engineers else learn from designers and design engineers? Turns out there’s lots, based on talking with one of the best design engineers in the industry, @Mappletons.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
03:24 From anthropology to tech
10:18 What does a designer do?
18:23 How Maggie works
24:55 The case for planning with physical tools
31:53 Why Maggie is learning woodworking
33:13 Design engineers and engineering constraints
38:49 How Maggie uses Figma
40:30 Design at GitHub Next
45:12 How has AI changed design
50:37 When models design and why humans are still needed
53:30 UX and UI
58:29 Capability gaslighting
1:00:33 One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment
1:07:21 Craft and AI tells
1:14:17 Visual gardens, home-cooked software, and barefoot developers
1:21:02 Advice for engineers and lessons from anthropology
1:25:34 Book recommendation
Brought to you by:
• @turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. turbopuffer.com/pragmatic
• @AntithesisHQ – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. antithesis.com/pragmatic
• @EntireHQ – every agent prompt, tool call, stored in your repo, and mirrored. Set up with one click: entire.io/pragmatic
Hope you enjoy this unusually visual episode - thanks again, Maggie!
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chad fowler retweeted
I think everyone should visit the Peace Museum in Hiroshima at least once in their life
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chad fowler retweeted
Prediction time.
@dhh just asked over a thousand attendees at #railsworld how many people still write code by hand on a regular basis. Less than 10 people raised their hand.
Let that sink in.
Next year the question will be how many people are still doing manual PR code reviews or directly looking at code on any regular basis. Result will be similar.
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chad fowler retweeted
What can us, engineers else learn from designers and design engineers? Turns out there’s lots, based on talking with one of the best design engineers in the industry, @Mappletons.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
03:24 From anthropology to tech
10:18 What does a designer do?
18:23 How Maggie works
24:55 The case for planning with physical tools
31:53 Why Maggie is learning woodworking
33:13 Design engineers and engineering constraints
38:49 How Maggie uses Figma
40:30 Design at GitHub Next
45:12 How has AI changed design
50:37 When models design and why humans are still needed
53:30 UX and UI
58:29 Capability gaslighting
1:00:33 One Developer, Two Dozen Agents, Zero Alignment
1:07:21 Craft and AI tells
1:14:17 Visual gardens, home-cooked software, and barefoot developers
1:21:02 Advice for engineers and lessons from anthropology
1:25:34 Book recommendation
Brought to you by:
• @turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. turbopuffer.com/pragmatic
• @AntithesisHQ – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. antithesis.com/pragmatic
• @EntireHQ – every agent prompt, tool call, stored in your repo, and mirrored. Set up with one click: entire.io/pragmatic
Hope you enjoy this unusually visual episode - thanks again, Maggie!
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We'll be in New York next week hosting a curated conversation with our friends at @buildexante on how we can use this historic inflection point to re-claim our digital agency and invent and start to (re)invent the internet we deserve.
Apply below!
The internet is up for grabs. AI is rewriting how we search & use software, feeds are flooded with synthetic junk, & platform power is harder to ignore.
Builders & investors watching it rearrange: join us, @buildexante @zweinberg in NYC. 9/29 at 6:30pm. luma.com/p08fg2mh
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chad fowler retweeted
Remote environments should be as fast as your local setup, trustworthy due to isolation and easy to control. Boxd is building for this future. Proud to back this team for their pre-seed; more great things to come. boxd.sh/blog/we-raised-2m-to…
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chad fowler retweeted
Your job may be surviving on inertia. Your resentment won’t extend the runway. What do you actually want to do with the intelligence now at your disposal?
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chad fowler retweeted
If by this you mean the term reflects the sensibilities to expression and not merely the embodied function I would agree, and by expression its not a syntactic thing since how we express ourselves to Claude, et al, seems to flow from those same sensibilities.
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chad fowler retweeted
AI is as useful as the context it can see & tools it can use. Two bad options: agents too siloed to be helpful or agents you trust with reckless abandon. This dilemma is an artifact of a security paradigm from the 90s. I think it’s overdue for an update. commonfabric.com/notes/inver…
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chad fowler retweeted
The language was never the goal.
I learned C(embedded) before I learned ruby.
What ruby gave me, was a community that like simplicity.
Some languages like Haskell give you cancer, you need a Rosetta Stone to understand it.
Ruby in other hand is so clear, that my dad who is not a ruby programmer found flaws in some code I wrote. In early days, he believed we write ruby in pseudo code.
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What a delightful API
Full docs for my new Ruby gem feelings now available. Most idiomatic and fun way to add decision models to your code
obiefernandez.com/gems/feeli…
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“A local, agent-first store that links the written intent behind a code change to its VCS commit and to stakeholder systems such as Jira, Confluence and Linear.” 🔥
rubygems.org/gems/intent-rec…
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chad fowler retweeted
I think Ruby attracts a certain type of person: one who values beauty, taste, joy, and a certain level of perfectionism 😅 Not just utility.
It has always fascinated me how many Rubyists are also musicians. Music may be the purest example of something created to make us feel, with no practical purpose. Architecture can be beautiful, but it still needs to hold up a building!
And not being the default choice means that people who pick Ruby do so deliberately. You don’t value the tool just for its utility, but also for how it feels to think and create with it.
That shared sensibility, together with @yukihiro_matz’s MINASWAN, makes the Ruby community the most special I’ve witnessed.
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Hey Rubyists, I'm starting to think that being a rubyist doesn't actually mean you're using Ruby. It's bigger than that. It's better than that.
Does that make sense?
cc @paolino @yukihiro_matz @pragdave
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chad fowler retweeted
For me it was about the principle of least surprise as an ethos: I want my software to do what a user expects it to, like Matz does with Ruby. I've long stopped using Ruby, but try to keep that with me.
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