Welcome

The “socratic approach” to teaching is to ask students pointed questions to lead students to discover things for themselves by thinking about the question and its possible answers. Could we adopt this approach to screening technical candidates? If so would it help us to better discover good technical candidates?

While it may be absolutely great to be surprised by an audience reaction while performing a theatrical production, being surprised by something happening in production is not great. How can we avoid the “audible gasp” moment in our code?

I would consider myself a skeptic when it comes to vibe coding and the use of LLM’s. But credit where it’s due. Gitpod did a good job of slapping together a small, simple Elixir app.

Feedback is often underestimated. As the task gets more complex, feedback becomes more and more important.

A brief discussion of some obvious observations that are routinely forgotten. We’re dealing with models and we’re not all dealing with the same models.

I am afraid that more and more people are following the outline of agile without understanding WHY the practices are important. It’s becoming a sort of cargo cult science situation.

I’ve been working on writing PEG expressions with Rosie Pattern Language to help people to search Elixir code bases for certain things. Very preliminary but I did want to share what I’ve got so far.

I suppose I will sound like a luddite but so far I’ve found AI to be more of a hindrance than a help! I’ll explain why.

A few people when discussing side work by developers trot out the argument “No one asks a surgeon if he or she does side work!” This argument is flawed in a few major ways.

I’ve started a newsletter called “The Impractical Engineer”. I hope you’ll give it a look!