Stand by for blurbs
What is old is new again
2025-02-19
TL;DR
Software development finally resembles construction
work.
I've read - for decades - how software at least
superficially resembles construction work. But that's not
true. In construction, hundreds if not thousands of years of
practical experience are leveraged, allowing a high degree of
planning to be successful. In software, we often don't know
exactly what we want to build, nor exactly how to build it.
Which, in the last few weeks, has changed. As Andrew Zigler
explains in
Mise en place for agentic coding, we really can plan in
advance, when our software agents leverage billions of man
hours of experience.
Unhooking CI/CD. Regression or progression?
2025-02-19
TL;DR
I've started unhooking personal CI/CD pipelines to help
speed development.
I used to build and maintain CI/CD pipelines in various
tools, most commonly spread between GitHub Actions, CircleCI,
and Semaphore. These pipelines need to be maintained. APIs
and a authentication methods evolve. However, it's time
consuming to keep them all running, especially after projects
have been dormant for a while. Thus I'm unhooking them. The
AI/Agentic power curve is moving too fast right now, none of
my personal projects are sensitive, and anyone I work for
will have these tools already in place, or I will build them
as part of the role. For now, there is no justification to
continue maintaining them.
Tooling expands, the problem remains the same
2026-02-18
TL;DR
tl;dr the paradox of choice scales infinitely.
Having started with ChatGPT back in the hoary old days of
2023, I would think I'd be quite acclimated to the pace of
change. But I am not. Change seems to be accelerating at an
increasing rate. Now with the ability to spin up entire
applications, I had a latent, perhaps subconscious impression
that I would finally get a grip on my personal projects, get
some focus, finish and ship. That is not the case. Instead,
I've started many new projects, and not really shipped any of
them. I may need to redefine what "shipped" means.