2026-08-27 08:00:00
The points are fake and the score is made up but we always finish 70% of our sprint and get around 30 points done per person. Hey waitaminute that almost sounds useful 🤨
I've said before that working in a high growth startup is like spinning plates – you do a bit here a bit there and kick the can to survive another day. There's always more work than people and spaceship-first development makes this worse because starting is easy and finishing is hard.
On my team we add ~50 new ideas to triage every sprint, work on 5 or 6 ongoing major projects, keep our production systems running (the SRE work), and build any number of little features and bugfixes that keep folks happy and aren't worth the overhead of a project.
2026-08-15 08:00:00
I've been experimenting with different approaches to build a system where humans and agents can ship fast safely. Think I've found something that works – custom linters.
Engineering teams produce more code than ever. I'm sure you've noticed. But you can't ship faster than you can validate and keeping the slop cannons safe is the architect or principal engineer's job. Or whatever you call the designated adult in the room :)
Here's what you need: Guardrails and feedback loops. They should be fast and cheap and apply to everyone writing code. Agent and human alike.
2026-08-08 08:00:00
I'm in the middle of migrating our design system and it's fun to see how much AI can do. Just last night I stayed up until 1am to ship another big portion.
Wait why am I coding at 1am if AI's doing all the work? 🤨
It's the spaceship problem. You start with the ending then work your way back to something useful. This kinda sucks.
2026-08-01 08:00:00
At scale you're always mid-migration but you never do a big-bang rewrite, right? I think that's changing 🤨
You see the secret of our industry is that "you never rewrite your software" but we're all always rewriting our software. When the business changes every 6 months, what else are you gonna do?
https://twitter.com/Swizec/status/1924875257669943383
2026-07-25 08:00:00
Ever worked with a useful software architect? Yeah me neither. But I sure have tried to be one.
Software architects have a weird role: Think about the code tomorrow. Today's code is what it is, how do we make it good tomorrow? Without slowing down, losing business, or falling off a cliff.
The worst architects write lots of docs nobody reads, make proclamations of The One True Way, and fall out of touch. Many effective architects put on the Software Janitor hat and burn out in 2 years.
2026-07-21 08:00:00
Can you believe I've been writing on swizec.com for 20 years? The blog started back when "have a website" was social media 🤯
Before that it was a webcomic site. Those posts do not survive but I recently found the sketches in my mom's basement and brought them to San Francisco. Little memento of a different path :)
I got swizec.com in 2005 and started hosting websites on the linux machine in my bedroom, which was also my only computer and everyone's web router. Fun times. Gentoo was my distro of choice and yes compiling from stage0 on a 1GHz overclocked Athlon takes forever.
