Use this page to scan recent stories from Martinfowler, see the themes that keep appearing, and jump into complete story briefs.
Building a slide template starts with three foundational choices — colours, fonts and layouts. Sumeet Gayathri Moghe covers the basics of color theory and how to build a reusable palette, the essentials of typography, including serif, sans-serif, handwritten and monospace fonts, plus the finer points of kerning and lea
A couple of months ago Jim Highsmith explained how practitioners writing for each other forms a distinct style of writing. He now adds a section to the article with more detail on the craft of how we write in this style. How the writer shows up in the prose, its four principles, the role of story, how to sensibly use A
When software meets hardware, engineering principles remain largely the same, but the sensible defaults often change. Kuldeep Singh describes our experience modernizing a large IoT fleet of battery-powered sensors. Our familiar principles remained important; what changed was how we applied them. These practices emerged
Naresh Jain compares coding agents building the same API service with and without a behavioral harness. A frontier model, GPT-6 Sol, passed every external evaluation either way. But a cost-optimized model, GPT-6 Luna, succeeded in only 3 of 10 unharnessed runs and all 10 with the harness. While adding the harness incre
Human collaboration, like most things, improves with feedback. But it's not obvious how to make feedback effective. Anuja Karnik and Sumeet Gayathri Moghe pass on a bevy of tips for healthy feedback, based on the principle that both praise and criticism should be seen as positive. more…
In response to my last fragments (probably the bit about us worrying if LLMs have consciousness when we when we should be wondering why they don’t have a conscience) “Metalanguage” replied : we shipped the id and forgot the superego. classic software lifecycle. I don’t know what was on their mind, but their post immedi
Not every presentation needs slides, but when they earn their place, they work as a visual channel that complements the speaker rather than replacing them. Sumeet Gayathri Moghe sets out the principles that follow from that idea — control over the rate of knowledge exposition, tight coupling between slides and speaker,
A Sensible Default is a practice that, absent some overriding context, should be used when carrying out a certain kind of task. In software development such sensible defaults might include things like “use version control”, “separate UI logic from domain logic”, “automate deployment pipelines”. The term “sensible defau
Simon Willison: The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge This has been a constant impression I get from following Willis
Rob Bowley is “flipping tables in his head” with anger at the current media coverage of the danger of AI killing us all The risk I’m worried about isn’t a future machine deciding to wipe us out. It’s today’s AI, being wired into everything, carelessly and fast. Cyber attacks have already cost millions of dollars in los
You are caught up for now.
Open the app view when you want faster scanning, saved stories, and source-focused reading in one place.