Benno Rice

What does it mean to be productive? If you work in software development that generally means shipping code, or at least changes to code. There’s always been a tension in how to measure the output of a software developer though, and that’s partly due to the at least partially creative nature of...

Errors. They happen. Sometimes we wish they wouldn't but they do and the code we write and the systems we build have to handle that. The processes by which we detect failures and handle them varies a lot though and the "right" way to deal with failures has been a topic of discussion generally...

I make code for a living. I also make code, and other things, for fun. I love learning new things and discovering new tools. So when I run into a tool that everyone tells me is the future of coding but I just can’t bring myself to accept it, what do I do? Large language models are the future of...

With the arrival of large language models and the generative tools built on them we have seen a huge increase in pressure to use these tools in our work. This worries me, but it's hard to easily explain why. Am I being paranoid? Or just overly opposed to a change that's inevitable? Is it just......

Why do some ideas seem to stick around forever? Why do some ideas seem like they've been there forever, even when they haven't? Why do some ideas never seem to gain traction, even when they're good?

COBOL was one of the first business-oriented programming languages, showing up in the 1960s. It’s also regarded as one of the worst languages in which to work. But is that true? And if so, what could ever take its place as the most reviled thing in dev?