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ultra-boss

47 karma · joined January 31, 2025

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ultra-boss··on “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
Couldn't agree more. I read a book (okay, I half read a book...I couldn't finish it, it was so bad) where the author (a marketer!) argued that software engineers are the most skeptical audience, and I was like, "Um, have you ever met an investigative journalist? Or people in the many many other professions that require skepticism and analytical thinking?"

The sooner the software engineering field can be rid of its beliefs about the inherent brilliance of programmers, the better for everyone involved. Inlcuding software engineers!

ultra-boss··on “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
"A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week."

plus plus plus plus plus to this.

ultra-boss··on How the Mountains Grew: A New Geological History of North America
This book legit changed the things I notice as I move about the natural world. Couldn't recommend it more.
ultra-boss··on Half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya: new research
more of this kinda stuff, please! :)
ultra-boss··on Close technical skills gaps with a principal learning engineer
Anybody have something like this at their company?
ultra-boss··on Ask HN: Where are developers hanging out?
Who are you and what are you trying to sell me? :)
ultra-boss··on Ask HN: Are forum sites becoming extinct?
I don't know that they're becoming "extinct", but the value some of them once provided, in my experience, has been greatly diminished by saas-enabled marketing infiltration. I mean, there are tools out there that will send you an alert when certain phrases are mentioned on sites like Reddit so that you can jump in and comment in a way that "surreptitiously" promotes your product, and companies are paying money for these tools. Gross, gross, gross.
ultra-boss··on Computer science should be called logic
Computer science "invents" logic? What do you mean by that?

Are you familiar with the philosophy of logic and philosophical logic? Or formal semantics, which utilizes tools from the fields of symbolic logic and mathematics to generate (very precise) theories around the semantics of natural language expressions?

ultra-boss··on The Utopia of Rules: Technology, Stupidity and Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2015)
R.I.P Mr Graeber. What a gem of a thinker.
ultra-boss··on Computer science should be called logic
We can apply logic to anything and everything. What makes computer science singularly deserving of this label?
ultra-boss··on What Makes a Great Software Engineer (Dissertation) (2016) [pdf]
"At a high level, our informants described great software engineers as people who are passionate about their jobs."

Curious to know this group's thoughts: Do you believe that passion is NECESSARY to be a "great" software engineer?

ultra-boss··on When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
Love reading these sorts of "technical problem + solution" pieces. The world does not need more content, in general, but it does need more of this kind of quality information sharing.
ultra-boss··on Developer Philosophy
Love this. Would love to see some type of grounded-theory qualitative analysis of Developer Philosophies of many senior software practitioners - can imagine what common themes would emerge, but I'm more curious to see which pieces feel intuitive and right but aren't supported by the majority of senior practitioners.