Back in the days when I did live talks, one of my abilities was to finish on time, even if my talk time was cut at the last moment (perhaps due to the prior speaker running over). The key to my ability to do this was to use Expansion Joints – parts of the talk
A few years ago, whenever I published a new article here, I would just announce it on Twitter, which seemed to help attract readers who would find the article worthwhile. Since the Muskover, Twitter’s importance has declined sharply. It now doesn’t take very much time at all for me to check posts of people I
AI editors like Cursor can generate code with remarkable speed using LLMs, handling boilerplate and providing functional snippets for various tasks. However, when building robust systems, functional correctness is only the starting point. Code must also be safe, predictable, maintainable, and free from subtle side effects. This article demonstrates, through a dialogue between a developer
This article provides a cohesive overview of four technical reports from DeepSeek: DeepSeek-LLM (Jan ’24): an early investigation of scaling laws and data-model tradeoffs. DeepSeek-V2 (Jun ’24): introducing Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE to improve memory and training efficiency. DeepSeek-V3 (Dec ’24): scaling sparse MoE networks to 671B parameters, with FP8 mixed precision training and intricate HPC
Creating a user interface that visualizes a real-world structure — like the Thirty Meter Telescope’s mirror — might seem like a task that demands deep knowledge of geometry, D3.js, and SVG graphics. But with a Large Language Model (LLM) like Claude or ChatGPT, you don’t need to know everything upfront. This article documents a journey
Building AI Agents that interact with the external world. One of the key applications of LLMs is to enable programs (agents) that can interpret user intent, reason about it, and take relevant actions accordingly. Function calling is a capability that enables LLMs to go beyond simple text generation by interacting with external tools and real-world
We have long recognized that developer environments represent a weak point in the software supply chain. Developers, by necessity, operate with elevated privileges and a lot of freedom, integrating diverse components directly into production systems. As a result, any malicious code introduced at this stage can have a broad and significant impact radius particularly with
Tools that treat diagrams as code, such as PlantUML, are invaluable for communicating complex system behavior. Their text-based format simplifies versioning, automation, and evolving architectural diagrams alongside code. In my work explaining distributed systems, PlantUML’s sequence diagrams are particularly useful for capturing interactions precisely. However, I often wished for an extension to walk through these
Every software team should strive for excellence in building security into their application and infrastructure. Within Thoughtworks, we have long sought accessible approaches to threat modeling. At its heart, threat modeling is a risk-based approach to designing secure systems by identifying threats continually and developing mitigations intentionally. We believe effective threat modeling should start simple
At goto copenhagen last year, my friend James Lewis interviewed me and Goto have just released the video. I talk about when I learned about iterative design from Kent Beck, the dangers of product owners interfering with business-developer communication, and writing the agile manifesto. During this he specifically asked about my essay Is Design Dead.