The trend is definitely going towards a smaller Engineering and a bigger AI section. I don’t like that. This week, have a look at John Cutler’s Feature Factory Retrospective and the No Man Is an Island post. If you want a podcast and like engineering, check out “Building resilient systems”.
Leadership
TBM 445: The Feature Factory: A 10-Year Retrospective - “First, you ARE working in a feature factory. So you don’t need any signs.”
TBM 444: What a Workplace Can’t Promise - it’s work, it’s not more, but also not less.
Remote first: What sucks? - “Everything happens in the same rectangle”
No Man Is an Island - “We care, and we should care, about contributing to the world. And if technology makes our contributions superfluous, then what is left?”
Engineering
Building resilient systems with Sam Newman [Podcast] - very good episode, I like his pragmatic style.
AI
mhoye: The LLM part is bad news but it isn’t the sign - long thread about what is happening in the Linux community. See also: Linus Torvalds’s first LLM-assisted patch series
The state of the tech industry in 2026 - mostly about AI.
The Pulse: new trend of building “internal vibe-coding apps” at tech companies - clearly everybody has too much time now.
Are Harnesses Worth the Cost? - maybe not.
Is this the ‘mathocalypse’? Why OpenAI’s latest results dump has left mathematicians in shock - OpenAI dumped a large number of papers, and nobody is sure if they make any sense.
Environment
Batteries are now cheaper than natural gas turbines used at many data centers - nice.
Random Beer
Offering alcohol-free beer on tap boosts pub choices while keeping revenues intact, new study shows - good to see some data on this.
We Don’t Need New Consoles [YouTube] - the only reason I play games is to look at pretty landscapes.
The rarest docs and books you’ve probably never read. - nice collection.