A 2023 paper published in the Journal of Manufacturing Processes set out to answer a seemingly narrow question: how does a machinist’s behavior differ when working on a conventional (manual) milling machine versus a CNC machine? The answer turns out to be surprisingly relevant far beyond the machine shop — particularly for software engineers navigating the rise of AI coding agents. The Study Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology designed a multi-modal study in which a trained machinist fabricated the same part — a leaf spring shackle — across four consecutive production runs on both conventional and CNC milling machines....
Continue reading...Programming
Claude’s take on “The Software Development Lifecycle Is Dead”
I was reading Boris Tane’s “The Software Development Lifecycle Is Dead” and agree with several of his points, but also understand from >30 years’ XP in industry and a couple years working with GenAI and actively researching neurosymbolic AI for the better part of the past decade, I can see where there are some oversimplifications in his post and some bleedover from the GenAI hype. That being said, and considering he calls out Claude Code in a few places as one of the silver bullets to SWE, I thought what better to analyze Boris’ post and provide counterpoints based on...
Continue reading...The Web API Trap
[X]aaS is great for proof-of-concept, rapid prototyping, and other quick turnaround development efforts; especially when they provide easy to use API endpoints. However, becoming over-dependent on these third-party vendors for you production systems can be a hidden liability to your product and business.
Continue reading...The hammer and the nail
Quite possibly one of the most-quoted phrases in the software industry: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” — Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science (1966) This is often pulled out and dusted off when discussions of high-level architectural components, stacks, and programming languages begin to get a bit heated. This post was inspired by a discussion with a budding computer scientist I know regarding why there are so many different programming languages, tools, and environments.
Continue reading...Dipping my toes into Elixir
So I recently (finally) decided to take the plunge and take a serious look at Ruby and Rails, so started pinging a colleague of mine who spends most of his day pounding around on a custom Rails app. After a couple weeks or so of setting up environments, digging through books, and plowing through the Ruby Koans, he asked me if I’d heard of a new language called Elixir and the Phoenix framework that has been creating quite a stir in Ruby circles…
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