Years ago, something clicked when I read about Anthony Bourdain’s approach to feeding crowds. It was his stunt turkey technique, where he cooks an extra turkey the week before the actual event. It made me think about how we release software. It seemed absurd at first: why would you cook two turkeys for one dinner? Then I realized what he was really doing: load balancing across time. ...
Remember autoconf? If you were building software in the late ’90s or early 2000s, you probably have scars. You’d write some configuration rules, run the tool, and out popped a perfectly functional makefile. It felt like magic, until it didn’t. The moment autoconf broke, you were debugging generated shell scripts that stretched for thousands of lines. The abstraction that seemed so elegant suddenly became opaque hell. You needed to understand not just what you wanted, but how the magic worked, where it could fail, and why. ...
Last week, I was reviewing an outline I worked on with an LLM agent for a technical article. It looked solid: comprehensive sections, logical flow, all the boxes checked. But something was off. On a hunch, I removed a section that was good (but didn’t quite fit) entirely. The result? Not only did the article flow better, but when I ran it through quality scoring, they all rated the shortened version higher. The very tools that helped created the meandering narrative recognized the improved signal when it was removed. ...