Preference toward layering is probably one of the more fundamental principles of software development. It pops up pretty quickly as soon as we start writing code. I wrote about layering extensively in the past, but basically, when we start connecting bits of code together, a tension arises between the bits. Some need to change faster … Continue reading “The Layering Principle”
This principle builds on the layering principle, and deals with a common decision point that most software developers reach many times in the course of their work. The situation that leads to this point unfolds something like this. There is some code at the lower layer that isn’t giving us the results we need for … Continue reading “The Wallpapering Principle”
Architecturally, Breadboard aspires to have an hourglass shape to its stack. As Bernhard Seefeld points out, this architecture is fairly common in compilers, and other NLP tools, so we borrowed it for Breadboard as well. In this brief essay, I will use the Breadboard project to expand a bit on the ins and outs of … Continue reading “Hourglass model and Breadboard”
Over the past couple of months, we’ve been working on a bunch of new things in the Breadboard project, mostly situated around developer ergonomics. I’ve mentioned creating AI recipes a bunch in the past, and it might be a good time to talk about the mental model of how such recipes are actually created. ❤️🔥 … Continue reading “The Breadboard developer cycle”
To make the asymptote and value niches framing a bit more concrete, let’s apply it to the most fun (at least for me) emergent new area of developer experience: the various developer tools and services that are cropping up around large language models (LLMs). As the first step, let’s orient. The layer above us is … Continue reading “AI Developer Experience Asymptotes”
I’ve been thinking about the different conditions under which innovation emerges, and how the environment influences the kind of innovation that happens. To set the stage, I am going to do a very brief detour into biology (I am not a biologist, so will definitely make a mess of it) and use the r/K-selection lens … Continue reading “r/K selection and innovation”
I’ve been thinking about the path that software dandelions take toward becoming elephants, and this really interesting framing developed in a conversation with my friends. Software dandelions are tiny bits of software we write to prototype our ideas. They might be as small as a few lines of code or deca-LOCs, yet they capture the … Continue reading “No ship ums”
I have been reading Alex Komoroske’s Compendium cards on platforms, and there’s just so much generative thinking in there. There’s one concept that I kept having difficulty articulating for a while, and here’s my Nth attempt at defining it. It’s about the thinness and thickness of layers. Given that layers have vectors of intentions, we … Continue reading “Cheesecake and Baklava”
Riffing on the cost of opinion piece, I realized that there’s a neat framing around opinion mutability and the underlying systems dynamic that’s worth mentioning. One way to think about the settledness of opinion is as finding a reasonable balancing point between the value and cost of the layer, where the value compounds at a … Continue reading “Moving the ladder”
I want to finally connect two threads of the story I’ve been slowly building across several posts. I’ve talked about the rise of makers. I’ve talked about the magicians. It’s time to bring them together and see how they relate to each other. First, let’s paint the picture a little bit and set up the … Continue reading “Makers and Magicians”