Chisomo Chiweza

Software engineering is a very satisfying craft. And there has never been a more opportune time to learn how to get great at it.

Indeed.

My engineering work so far has been implementing systems and maintaining them in production. I must say, aside from programming - I really dig this sysadmin stuff especially on Linux.

Working with your hands/building things is good for character development. When you only deal with abstract thoughts in your work you can easily spinoff into goofy shit because nothing opposes you. When you work with your hands the universe itself opposes you and reminds of boundaries and costs.

Binge watched the first season in uni and so excited for this iteration! youtu.be/UWFfmD8n-xA?...

What I think is important is to continue caring about the things you love despite anything. The storm will pass. The chaff will be blown away. Good work will continue standing.

This was the most heartwarming thread I read this morning.

For anyone who thinks AI is new, *MY MOM* wrote a bibliography of the literature on AI in 1959. Yes, MY 93-YEAR-OLD MOM. Yes, I'm proud of her. www.google.com/books/editio...

GM. We are going to win. An internet where 4 corporations wall us all into their surveillance state and make us pay rent forever is just incompatible with human flourishing. The only question is how long it takes everyone propping up history's worst billionaires to figure this out.

Another engrossing read. estherweidauer.com/articles/why...

i recorded an over-the-shoulder video of me coding a zero-dependency static website and podcast feed generator in Ruby from scratch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZy4... ruby is a great fit for these types of projects since it has robust templating, file utils, and YAML parsing built into the stdlib

An insightful read. Thank you.

Nobody ever wrote code "by hands". You write code with your brain. Or you don't.

And here's the podcast episode where Sam Newman mentioned them as an excellent startup to help uplevel incident management inside of startups. newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-r... Back at Uber, during my time, there was infrequent internal outage simulation that was an awesome exp

The mechanism of coding was largely solved by the mid-1960s: we knew how to tell a machine to do anything computable. What wasn’t solved, and arguably can’t be, is knowing what to tell it, confirming it’s right and keeping it right as requirements shift.

If engineers gave accurate eng estimates:

I genuinely hateeeee integrating anything that has to do with Meta. - Bad documentation - Confusing dashboard - Long processes - App review rejects you with zero real explanation - Business verification is a whole side quest - Their customer service is deadass a myth. Nonexistent.

Today in 1931, 2001 #ACMTuringAward recipient Ole-Johan Dahl was born. Dahl received the ACM Turing Award with Kristen Nygaard for ideas fundamental to the emergence of object-oriented programming, through their design of the programming languages Simula I and Simula 67. 🔗 buff.ly/fDSavPD

A quick reminder that we should not conflate *confidence* with *expertise* -- one helps you to notice whether an output is correct while the other does not #AIES2026

I guess my thought is that substantially all the software I'm responsible for is "mission critical". I've always gravitated to problems that matter

Over 10,000 open software jobs now indexed on The Consensus, at nearly 900 companies building software infrastructure. theconsensus.dev/jobs.html

I was thinking about atproto more and had a thought: no one needs to know or care about the protocol. we just need to normalize the idea that it’s bonkers to allow any company to own part of your identity it’s like how you used to lose your phone number if you switched carriers. that sucked

I wish the blast radius ended at programmers. I feel like sidelined mathematicians might have unintended consequences in the future. youtube.com/shorts/9zqPm...

Seeing people joke about software engineering in the wake of Margaret Hamilton's death. Obviously there's a difference between what's largely euphemised as software engineering presently and the discipline she strove to create.

Software engineering could and should be done with the same care as any other type of engineering. This is a post in honor of Margaret Hamilton (and also a subtweet of all vibe-coders everywhere).

who are some human people innovating on web design these days? The Claude & friend design default styles do the job, but they aren't really pushing boundaries, and I worry about design stagnating.

Use curiosity as a tool to unlock opportunity in life. youtu.be/p-434uErPDY?...

Reading an old HBR article for work. Some interesting points made even then. hbr.org/2019/03/digi...

You're using AI wrong.

Thissss!!!!!

As of this month, The Consensus has now passed 1,000 followers on Twitter, 1,000 followers on LinkedIn, and 1,000 newsletter subscribers. A decent first 9 months! Even in the age of AI, and likely supercharged due to it, people still want to understand how software works.

I've never felt more I inspired as a software engineer. youtu.be/kHL3XzjpT5w?...

There is so much to learn in software engineering. Just when I think I know something, I realize there is yet more to discover.

Happy Sunday and God bless ya'll.

People who think programmers are simply against automation have clearly never learned their IDE enough to achieve flow state.

I care a lot about software systems and helping another human being meet a genuine need with it. At best, I'm open to exploring sustainable machine learning techniques. Otherwise? If it means caring about the systems less and dehumanising people more, I'm not buying it.

Making a change nowadays is just about changing a few lines or so. Why you ask? Intentional architectural design inspired by friction folks.

I realize I'm more inclined to share my thoughts on here when my default pin remains just following. My brain gets hacked a bit more than I'd want to admit I guess.

there's a really nice little AI-booster-free community sprouting up at humancrafted.dev/forum to talk about the joys of coding by hand & how to navigate this current moment come help make this ad-free discussion-centric hangout zone a wonderful place!

I'm back to Following as my main feed. Being able to hide reposts from accounts instead of muting helps a ton. For You is great, but it is quite addictive and quickly turns into a heavy US centric feed. After the change, I've moved a lot of scrolling time to exploring Wikipedia. Better like this.