Andrew Lombardi wrote "Unit Tests are Not the Enemy" as a response to seeing people proud to remove verification from their codebases. That's removing the bad fire alarms, not addressing the fire, and he has suggestions for actually doing it all well.
Stephane Bury has released Arcana, a Java CLI/library that extracts an amazing array of archive types, including ZIP, 7z, RAR, TAR, CAB, MSI, ISO 9660, and XAR, and many, many more.
By dreamreal
Alberto Denia's artisan and engineer are a good lens on agentic coding: an artisan keeps his fingers on the code, and an engineer relies on the factory to make bricks. Both work, at different scales.
By dreamreal
Kristen Maevyn's essay "The Decoherence Trap" names the cost a system accrues when it holds several valid but mutually incompatible models, so every change becomes a job of translating between them and guarding against side effects.
Zig keeps improving as a programming language. Unfortunately, its management increasingly seems determined to make it a bad choice for the people who actually want to use it.
Mike Jackson wants the blind men and their elephant retired as a lesson in systems thinking, and his reasons are good. The parable's flaw is its narrator, who stands outside the world he describes and always has.
Pele, Obsidian's new Mermaid graph renderer, has no DOM dependency and no runtime dependencies, which means it runs on GraalJS on a stock JDK, as well as being a very nice drop-in replacement for client-side Mermaid.
Emergent design says architecture should flow from how something is used rather than from how it was dictated. Inside a codebase, that’s tests pulling the structure into shape. Across codebases it’s something older: a narrow substrate, a caller nobody expected, and a universe that stops exactly where the primitives do.
In "The Geometric Model of Maintenance," someone finally checked the “one month of code, ten days of maintenance” rule against real git history. The number holds up. What it’s made of is worth a look, and so is what you’d need to measure before it tells you anything about your own code.