What Text Adventures Taught Me About Software
How text adventure games like Zork shaped my understanding of software design, interface thinking, and the power of constraints to fuel creativity....
Mutation Testing Primer: Finding Real Bugs
Mutation testing answers what coverage can't: do your tests actually catch bugs? Learn how to use mutation testing tools to find the gaps in your test suite....
Why AI Can't Count the R's in Strawberry
LLMs confidently say strawberry has two R's because they've never seen letters—only tokens. This tokenization blindness predicts where AI will fail....
Speaker Diarization: The Hardest Problem Nobody Talks About
Why Zoom transcripts attribute quotes to the wrong people. The cocktail party problem isn't solved - it's hidden. Multi-device synchronization as a workaround....
Write Your Own Build Scripts
Build tool complexity has gotten out of control. A 50-line shell script often does the job better than any framework....
Programming Before Google: When You Read Manuals
Programming in the pre-internet era meant libraries, magazines, and BBSs....
Code Review Is Broken
Code review as practiced by most teams is a bottleneck that provides less value than we pretend. Small PRs, distributed reviewing, and time SLAs can fix it....
My First Computer
1977 was the year everything started. The Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET created personal computing....
Debugging Before Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow launched in 2008. For the first thirty years of my career, 'Google the error message' wasn't an option....