Popular posts
Is Ralph Wiggum the Future of Coding?
Autonomous AI coding doesn't fail because models aren't smart enough. It fails because we give them too much context, vague goals, and no hard definition of success. The Ralph Wiggum approach flips that on its head. Short contexts, brutally clear tasks, hard completion signals, and relentless...
The Next AI Breakthrough Is Old-Fashioned Software Engineering
The next AI breakthrough won't be smarter models but reliable ones. Like self-driving cars, progress of AI agents means consistency over demos. The future of AI lies in disciplined software engineering, building agents that work safely and predictably every time, not just sometimes.
The 4 Ways LLMs Fail
Large language models (LLMs) and AI agents that use them often get lauded as magic. But anyone using them in production or serious applications quickly learns how often they fail. What we commonly call hallucinations, workslop, or vulnerabilities are not random bugs. They tend to cluster into...
No, RAG Isn't Dead, It Just Leveled Up As Context Engineering
There’s been a lot of recent buzz around whether Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has reached its limits. Is RAG truly dead or just replaced by new approaches like search agents, MCP, or massive context windows? That's still retrieval-augmented generation under a new name.
Building a Perplexity Clone with 100 lines of code
AI search apps like Perplexity.ai are really cool. They use an LLM to answer your questions, but pull in real-time search results to augment the answer (eg RAG) and list citations. I wanted to know how it works and decided to build my own version. Getting it to work is surprisingly simple and...
A Brief History of Scaling Uber
On a cold evening in Paris in 2008, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp couldn't get a cab. Fast forward to today where Uber is the largest mobility platform in the world, in over 70 countries, 10,500 cities, and 130 million users. Here's the story of the key moments in scaling Uber engineering ...
Think Like a Farmer
You don't grow crops by yelling at plants and you don't grow team velocity by pressuring engineers. Great managers prepare the ground. Give clarity, tools, and trust. Focus on support, not blame. Remove blockers, nurture growth, match people to problems, and improve yourself first.
The Power of Pre-Mortems in Software Development
The software post-mortem is well known. It’s a standard best practice that really marks the end of any software project. It also fits in well with the Agile manifesto, specifically the retrospective - always be reflecting, always be improving. Post-mortems are usually only conducted when thin...
Don't Ask for Feedback, Ask for Advice
Everyone wants feedback. In fact, studies show employees who get regular feedback are more engaged and higher performing. The problem is, unless you have a strong trusting relationship with a person you are asking, you may not get the concrete feedback you are looking for. People don’t want t...
A Brief History of Scaling LinkedIn
LinkedIn's scaling journey began with a single application and evolved into a microservices architecture, enhancing scalability and reliability. This transition involved the introduction of technologies like Kafka for data streaming and Rest.li for API interactions, showcasing the need for ev...
Custom Android Tabs
Wanting to change the default TabWidget look and feel for Android? In this tutorial, we will investigate a few different ways to customize your app’s tabs.With Android SDK 1.6 and above, the SDK allows you to set a View as the tab instead of just text and an icon. We use be using that techniq...