Ian Huston

YouTube video by IT Revolution Steve Yegge and Gene Kim Pairing Session: Using Claude Code to Migrate Wyvern Management Scripts

I'm also putting this video of AI aided pair programming by @realgenekim.bsky.social and Steve Yegge at the top of my watch list www.youtube.com/watch?v=Htqx...

So many great things in this piece by @codefrenzy.bsky.social about how AI coding assistants could lead to a change in identity for software engineers.

As a leader I appreciate the highlighting of paths people might follow if their core identity is challenged by these changes.

Completely agree on the tough line to walk. I find direct learning is also hard to apply in another team's context, so the transferrable learnings are more about method/approach, which is definitely still useful. Creating incentives for that sharing across teams is another challenge.

I suspect 2 elements of measurement strategy would significantly help here:
- a deeper specification than "cycle time." Incorporating even a rough taxonomy of categories of work tasks into our measures could be really helpful
- testing for *within-group* changes relative to a specific intervention

Perhaps that's why we see more self-led team level interventions, such as team retrospectives, driving change where the team can "just see it's better", compared to better measurements of changes across groups of teams.

Thanks for this work! Even in a mid-size org (~300 devs), I find getting the necessary alignment on task creation/completion definitions, or other pre-reqs for a consistent measurement strategy, can be a big hill to climb already.

Really interesting data here on how cycle time varies over different periods within companies, teams, or for individuals. Makes impact of any action to change cycle time very hard to measure.

No Silver Bullets: Why Understanding Software Cycle Time is Messy, Not Magic Understanding factors that influence software development velocity is crucial for engineering teams and organizations, yet empirical evidence at scale remains limited. A more robust understanding of t...

🚨 new preprint paper alert 🚨 - led by @johnflournoy.science !!

In "No Silver Bullets," we take a big, mathy swing at a complex topic: measuring cycle time in software development and why we think it's messy, not magic

arxiv.org/abs/2503.05040

Planet Definitions xkcd.com/3063

Inspired by the AI hostility on this platform, I decided to share how I use AI.

“I treat AI as I would a collaborator or a pretty good intern but I remain responsible for the final outcome.”

lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/1/30/ho...

My LLM codegen workflow atm A detailed walkthrough of my current workflow for using LLms to build software, from brainstorming through planning and execution.

I've been hearing a lot about different programming workflows to make full use of LLMs, but I want in-depth accounts of how it works. This blog by Harper Reed is exactly what I've been looking for.

harper.blog/2025/02/16/m...

If you read nothing else about AI this week, read this - absolutely fascinating, ties together a whole bunch of recent developments in the field

Wrote my own notes here but really this piece defies summarization, you should absorb the whole thing simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/19/...

DORA Report 2024 – A Look at Throughput and Stability Google recently released the 2024 Accelerate State of DevOps (DORA) report, and there were some holy shit moments in those 120 pages. Or–to phrase it more professionally–this year’s report has some…

Google recently released the 2024 Accelerate State of DevOps (DORA) report, and there were some holy shit moments in those 120 pages. Or–to phrase it more professionally–this year’s report has some very interesting and counterintuitive findings.

redmonk.com/rstephens/20...

YouTube video by Øredev Conference Kent Beck & Beth Andres-Beck - We're Good At Writing Software [Keynote]

The original #ForestAndDesert talk is now available on YouTube!

@kentbeck.bsky.social and I compared our experiences and found a common technique: developers gathering with other developers. Together, we can figure out how to improve whatever is making our work hard.

youtu.be/nt6m8qtRbz0

@bethcodes.bsky.social is there a good place to read about "Plan Half"? I'm not familiar with it, unless you mean just keep 50% of time unplanned.

Does that mechanism need to be something like the exec sponsored project with a new method & no rules / bring in outside help / carve out an internal startup and grow culture in order to take a big enough step?

I like the idea of attractors, and maybe retros play the role of the gradient descent step: find one small thing to make better next time.

That raises the question of what type mechanism is needed to take the big enough steps to go from one basin (desert) to another (forest).

At Pivotal (pre VMware/Broadcom at least) this was the standard for most SW teams. Doing lots of pair programming, the desktop (usually iMac) was shared among the whole team, and there was no sense of "my machine".

One side effect was devs in a meeting room rarely had laptops as a distraction.

Don't think a personalised cold marketing email with the subject "Urgent Fire Drill" is really going to get the reaction you want from your audience.

Starter packs are a great way to find people. But I followed a few tech/AI starter packs, and now have a sizeable gender skew in who I'm following.

To counteract, I started collecting this list. Who else should I be following & add? 👇 go.bsky.app/LaGDpqg

Definitely some good announcements coming out of #githubuniverse about Copilot. I wonder if the IntelliJ plugin is going to keep up or there will be more pressure to move to VScode to take advantage of latest features.

That was relatively simple to set up if you've ever edited dns records before.

I really like Drew's framework here dividing current AI use-cases into Gods (human replacement, which I think of as still mostly science fiction), Interns (assistants you delegate closely-reviewed tasks to, which is most of how I use LLMs today) and Cogs (smaller tools that can more reliably […]

I stopped posting long ago on twitter but kept reading just to stay up to date on tech topics. Looks like there's enough critical mass over here now to make the move.