The AI Puppet Dance

Do you like bananas? I do – sort of. It’s more precise to say I like banana. That is, one banana, not multiple. I suspect many people are like me. We enjoy eating a banana, very few eat two bananas in a row, no-one in the history of mankind has ever eaten three. To really […]

It’s pretty cute that self-help people have discovered exponential functions. Just improve 1% every day, and you will have improved almost 38-fold by the end of the year! Because you see, 1.01^365 is 37.78. Wow! So inspirational! But what does it mean? What does it mean for me to improve 1%? What is it that […]

Kent Beck recently published a blog post called “Friction >> Debt”, where he suggests that the “technical debt” metaphor has outlived its usefulness and suggests “friction” as a replacement. The problem, according to Beck, is that “the business folks” are prone to interpret “technical debt” as a weak excuse for wanting to spend time fixing […]

This is a transcript of a talk I did at Booster 2023 in Bergen. Here’s a scene. Imagine we’re having a stand-up meeting. A stand-up meeting, as you will be aware, is a ritual where a team of software developers stands in a circle in the hope of summoning the spirit known as agility. If […]

A fundamental challenge we face as programmers is that the world is alive, but the programs we write, alas, are not. When we deploy our dead programs to operate in the living world, it presents an immediate maintenance problem. Or, if you like, a matter of keeping up appearances. In the movie Night on Earth, […]