Gidi

In my native tongue, the word naval, means villain.
Just saying.

Fuck yeah.

Green morning everyone.

Haha that's not quite what I mean.

You can think of it as mobbing - a pair of engineers working with the agents, so that you get the real time feedback of a pair in the same way as before, just augmented by AI.

Where do the XP folks hang out these days?

I feel like all the online communities I had in the 2010s have gone stale.

I think the DORA metrics have played a significant role in this - the gap between High Performance and Elite is just easier to close with XP because it removes the drag caused by async work.

Teams now have a science backed way of demonstrating that pairing can be higher performance than solo.

I'm really excited by these signals.

I've been on three XP teams - one that I inherited, which is how I learned the practice - and two that I've built.

All three have been the most effective teams I've ever been on.

I'm now building a fourth and can't wait to see how far we can push XP with AI.

Sounds amazing 😍 can't wait to read it.

Tired: Claude

Wired: Marvin

I forsee a spike in VP titles.

I've started a new role and writing Golang for the first time in my career.

I don't get it.

Maybe it's because I've gotten used to the rich type systems of Rust and Kotlin, but Go feels like I'm back to basic OO again.

What am I missing?

Ooh, very exciting!
The first edition is one of the best summaries I've read on the topic, and top of my recommendation list to budding engineers.

How does the second edition differ? What are the key areas you've revisited?

I walk in on my wife and 10 month old having a dance party without me, to the tunes of Lady Gaga.

My wife: "this was *his* choice, BTW"

" And how did he express this choice, exactly?" I enquired.

She looks me dead in the eyes: "he said ga ga".

Fair.

My team at NatureMetrics is hiring a product-minded Full Stack Engineer (London/nearby) who cares about nature.

We're turning complex biodiversity data into something people can actually understand and act on - your code could directly help save ecosystems. 🌿

Go + K8s a big plus.

I love how Gen Z's Sarah Connor is Nancy Wheeler.

A map of England, Scotland and Wales, showing the alignment of “the three norths”, which has moved through England over the last couple of years and is about to go into the North Sea. The movement is shown by a blue line.

This is cool. The three norths (True, Grid, Magnetic) met in Dorset in November 2022, worked their way northwards in tandem, and are now about to leave England and go hand in hand into the North Sea.

www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/news/three-n...

Kate Finlayson is South African, from Cape Town I believe.

Honestly, the PSF has shown more ethical backbone here than any other tech-centred org I know.
Huge respect.

The official home of the Python Programming Language

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-...
🧵

As someone who worked in Ad Tech I can tell you that with high likelihood Ads are the culprit.

Sad to say I'm seeing as much racism and antisemitism on bluesky as I was seeing on Twitter before I left it.

Might be time to just switch it all off.

Pitkah Tovah.
May we have less to reflect on next year.

I have a fear, which might be totally unfounded but I guess we'll find out, that folks are going "AI first" when trying to solve problems before they even bother trying to figure it out.

If that's the case, I worry engineers are going to lose their problem solving skills very quickly.

Haha yeah, I guess, for boomers and gen X it's a smaller proportion of the generation so less representative....

But yeah, bad generalisation.

I think we're the only generation that had to figure out how things worked to get basic things done on computers....

Though they might be a bias on my end.

I was hiking in fjordland last year and saw a flock of parrots above... Expecting a mischievous Kea to decend I felt for my car keys when a unusual screech came out above - it was no Kea, it was a Kaka. ☺️

My first time spotting them out in the wild.

Schemaless databases lack a schema in the same way dynamic languages lack a type system.
That is to say, they don't, it's just abstracted away.

As a result, you still have migrations, and they are often harder.

I always start with postgres unless I *know* it makes the wrong tradeoffs for my domain

Same, I've always used the EM dash in my writing but—if I'm being honest—I use it way more now that folks are using it to misclassify content as LLM generated.

Haha, I wish you health to use it.

This definitely falls into the category of "notebooks I'll buy but never use because I'm waiting for a worthy enough idea".

I already have a half dozen in this category. 😅

I've long felt that testing is a dying art, but LLMs feel like the a stab to the heart of this art.

Its unfortunate, because I actually find LLMs pretty good at generating the green implementation for my red failing TDD tests. 🤷

But most engineers don't TDD so it's just generating noise