Simon Willison’s Weblog

Reduce Friction. Outstanding essay on software engineering friction and development team productivity by C J Silverio: it explains the concept of “friction” (and gives great definitions of “process”, “ceremony” and “formality” in the process) as it applies to software engineering, lays out the challenges involved in getting organizations to commit to reducing it and then provides actionable advice on how to get consensus and where to invest your efforts in order to make things better. # 25th July 2022, 10:25 pm

Visual Studio Code: Development Process (via) A detailed description of the development process used by VS Code: a 6-12 month high level roadmap, then month long iterations that each result in a new version that is shipped to users. Includes details of how the four weeks of each iteration are spent too. # 20th July 2022, 4:34 pm

The End of Localhost. swyx makes the argument for cloud-based development environments, and points out that many large companies—including Google, Facebook, Shopify and GitHub—have made the move already. I was responsible for the team maintaining the local development environment experience at Eventbrite for a while, and my conclusion is that with a large enough engineering team someone will ALWAYS find a new way to break their local environment: the idea of being able to bootstrap a fresh, guaranteed-to-work environment in the cloud at the click of a button could save SO much time and money. # 8th June 2022, 6:09 pm

Contributing to Complex Projects (via) Mitchell Hashimoto describes in detail his process for understanding and eventually contributing to a complex new codebase. I picked up a whole bunch of useful tips from this. # 15th March 2022, 6:09 am