Now we only pair program with humans when pair programming with AI didn't solve our problem. Needless to say, we pair program less and less. Or rather, to be more precise, we're pair programming more than ever but not with humans.
In my fully remote and distributed work environment, everything you do to make your colleagues' work easier (better docs, better reviews, better comments, clearer code, etc.) is also making AI's work easier. The better the work environment, the more helpful the AI.
The more you understand that your goal is to push actual business metrics forward (i.e. creating real value for end users), the more stakeholders will want to give you important responsibilities. You are a businessperson who only incidentally happens to use code sometimes.
Code reviewing skills are becoming more important than coding skills.
The overwhelming majority of people I've worked closely with during my entire career have been great people. Smart, kind, hard-working. And yet I hear so many horror stories from so many folks. Maybe I just got lucky 🍀.
My kids, 3 months after moving from a private catholic school in Lyon to a public school in Paris: "Daddy, kids here watch TV, play video games, swear, and talk about sex. Some of them even smoke and take drugs." They thought I would be horrified but this made me laugh 😆.
Never trust your users. If they can break your system somehow, they will, sooner or later.
3 of my kids aged 7, 9 and 10 now get ready and walk to school by themselves in the morning in Paris. My district feels like a village. Some places are true catalysts for increased autonomy.
I've learnt more about system design for large scale distributed applications in 6 months of infrastructure engineering than in 2 years of full-stack product engineering.
I deleted a meeting by mistake in Google Calendar. I instinctively used Cmd+Z, but then realized that it most likely wouldn’t work, and lo and behold, it just worked. Love it when software goes the extra mile.
My new workflow: I ask Cursor Composer with Agent mode to implement my PRs. Then once all the linting and tests pass, I push my PR to Github. Then I review the PR in GitHub as if someone else wrote it to make sure I understand everything.
Most of my work now consists in reviewing AI generated code.
Excellent épisode de podcast de ma femme Émilie Laplagne sur pourquoi la médecine traditionnelle passe à côté de notre bien être, et comment la médecine préventive et de longévité peut nous aider à vivre mieux et plus longtemps ! (sans être biaisé, vraiment ! 😌) 👇🏽
In a blame-free culture, most of the pressure comes from yourself. Sure, sometimes you didn't properly anticipate. Netflix can't handle the boxing match. OpenAI is down for 4h. We all fail. It doesn't matter who's fault it is. We just want to learn and grow from it.
My kids in public school have 10% of kids from a kids’ shelter in their classes. Sure, they often disrupt the classroom which makes learning harder for the others. But if we don’t welcome and integrate them, who will…?
Why did I wait so long before trying Oh My Zsh…? Saving so many keystrokes, especially with the Git plugin.
If your app is down, you are responsible. Period. You can never blame third-party providers for being down (Stripe, OpenAI, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, etc.). You own the user experience, you need to have backups in place. Never accept any single point of failure.
When your app has some issues and VPs and directors reach out to you, you know that you're working on something significant. It's an added stress and responsibility for sure but it also gives tremendous meaning and context to my work.
Every Monday morning, solve 2 leetcode exercises from the list below, containing 50 exercises. So every year, you solve each problem twice, and it gets easier and easier. This way, just by practicing ~1h a week, you are always ready for most coding leetcode style interviews. Just do it.
No sorry, I didn't mean such kinds of tax deductions, I find the tax incentive to have tax deductions for charities to be great, since in some ways it allows you to decide where a good chunk of your taxes go. I meant those using tricks and schemes to avoid paying what would naturally be due.
Before giving pocket money to homeless folks in the street, one needs to make sure that they are being fully honest in their tax declaration. I've little admiration for folks who find clever ways to pay less taxes then brand themselves philanthropists.
There’s a limited number of things you can give a f*ck about. All the f*ck you give about money can’t be given to other things. Many Europeans care less about wealth than Americans. I would be richer in the US but I don’t care.
Spent 30 minutes with Cursor Composer in Agent mode with Sonnet to try to fix a complex bug (with tests passing locally but failing in the CI/CD). Gave up and detailed my issue to o1-preview, which gave me a proper fix straight off the bat.
Having now Cursor Composer suggest changes, then run the tests, and fix its proposals iteratively is a whole new level in the agentic coding workflow. I don't even have to run the tests myself and share the terminal results with it.
Now that I mostly code with Cursor, it makes challenges like Advent of Code a bit less appealing. Why spending time practicing things where LLMs are already better than us? It may be smarter to try to practice in the areas where we might still have some edge… for now...
My 10 yo daughter: "Daddy, if I want to go to l'École Polytechnique, do you think I should be the first in my class?"
Well, darling, I will not put any pressure on you, but I think that if that is your goal, you may want to rather aim to be… first in school!
During 8 years with my kids in a private school in Lyon, we suffered no teachers strike ever.
After 2 months in public school in Paris, we suffer our first full day of teachers strike.
And then we wonder why many parents who can afford it put their kids in private establishments.
All of my wife's black friday shopping was done on Shopify shops. Makes my work rather tangible to my family. Feels good.
