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.
2026-07-11 08:00:00
In the last few months every engineer I hired stumbled in exactly the same way: Project management. They learned quickly, but that first big project has become a rite of passage.
We're talking about strong engineers great at writing code and thinking through problems. Everyone with at least 5 years of experience. I would trust them to design and own almost any system.
We like to give engineers lots of agency and autonomy.
2026-07-06 08:00:00
No matter how much code you create, it's zero value until you ship. Writing code, building features, moving tickets, they're all vanity metrics. None of it matters until users can do something they couldn't do before.
With AI you can produce more code faster than ever before. And it doesn't matter. I bet you're still shipping at about the same speed as before aren't you?
We can see this in the data! You can feel it by looking around. Everyone talks about using AI, burning tokens, and doing work, but you rarely see people talk about getting more done at a company level.
2026-06-27 08:00:00
The death of engineering has been greatly exaggerated. You still need to know what you're doing.
Paternity leave and vibe coding have finally created enough time and mental space to rewrite my blog. This has been on my mind for years! Gatsby, the tech behind swizec.com, has not scaled to the size of website I've got.
My dude, it takes 45min+ to deploy a new article and my mind fills with dread every time I gotta go in there to fix bugs. As such we've been on a steady bit-rot decline for years 😔
2026-06-23 08:00:00
Hiring engineers is like deciding what kind of system you'll have. This seems obvious but surprised me to see first-hand.
If you hire a distributed systems person, you'll get a distributed system. A React dude will build you a frontend app. Pythonista gets you a traditional server-client app, maybe with HTMX for the fancy bits. Database wizard and all the interesting stuff happens in the database, CSS and fonts wizard and you'll solve everything with custom kerning rules and modern CSS you didn't even know existed.
They all have good arguments. Yes of course the problem fits a typical single-page-app, obviously this one requires deep database triggers and fancy indexes, and yeah of course doing it all in CSS is best.
