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I write with real insight into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.
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Beware the spaceships

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.

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Agents change the math on big bang migrations

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

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How to be useful as a software architect

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.

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swizec.com is now on TimberJS, a new React framework

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.

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The one thing every experienced engineer gets wrong

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.

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Theory of constraints, AI, and code review

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.

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