Preach. The hardest problems in computer science may be cache invalidation and naming things, but the hardest problem in modern application development is navigating the ocean of enshittification caused by short-term thinking and a socioeconomic backdrop that empowers non-technical managers and commoditizes engineers.

My goal is not release cadence. My goal is to be able to write "this repository is stable, secure, optimized, and feature-complete" in every project readme.

We should do this for ourselves, and for the future. We could build a world of stable, feature-complete ecosystems that move (voluntarily) together on a quarterly release cycle. We could focus on writing nearly perfect software with a long shelf life.

I take a tremendous amount of inspiration from the Jump team building Firedancer, though my understanding of their work barely qualifies as surface-level. What a public demonstration of software engineering excellence while doing cutting-edge work.

I also think younger engineers are being brainwashed by modern engineering culture. I am fortunate to have a mentor who had a career before Agile and worked in zero-bugs-tolerated environments. I realize this level of quality is not always realistic or optimal, but I suspect many younger web engineers just assume Agile is the best way. I did.

Younger engineers: agile has merits, but it has become the mechanism that managers (a) use to keep you keyed-up and short-term focused, and (b) deal with the fact that neither they nor their clients know what they are doing. Find the people who can rebuild the Information Age from scratch, and listen to them.