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For some, the COVID-19 pandemic was a mere blip – a pause in the busyness before life returned to normal. For many people engaged in building software, however, the world looks very different in 2024 – especially if you consider the way AI has fundamentally changed how we specify, write, and verify software.

In 2012, I began collecting thoughts and learnings from pair programming in a long document that I thought could one day become a book. Last year, when engineers at Promptworks asked for some pair programming resources, I circulated the manuscript internally. Jon Long saw its potential and tipped off Katel LeDû, the CEO of A Book Apart, who got in touch about making it the next title in their Briefs collection.

The last connecting flight between home and my college was on a comically small airplane. It was a 1996 Beech turbo-prop with no lavatory, no overhead bins, and 19 of the tiniest seats you’ll ever see. About 10 minutes into the 45-minute flight, the copilot would crawl out of the cockpit and serve drinks to the handful of passengers aboard. He could barely finish opening everyone’s cans of soda and handing out the peanuts before needing to return to the cockpit for landing.

When we write software, a surprising amount of our time is spent not in front of a computer, but in front of our clients, educating them about the nature of software and the application development process. They’re spending a lot of money for a custom product they don’t truly understand, even if they’ve bought software before or have been in the industry a long time.

The video of my talk from Wicked Good Ruby Conf in Boston is online.

The video of my talk at Madison Ruby is online. Automated infrastructure is intimidating but very important, so I encourage conference attendees to dip their toe in the water with a simpler subset of the Chef stack.

A well-designed DSL improves programmer productivity and communication with domain experts. The Ruby community has produced a number of very popular external DSLs—Coffeescript, HAML, SASS, and Cucumber to name a few.

I’ll be giving a talk on Chef at Madison Ruby in Madison, WI, August 23-24.

I’ve joined Mike Nicholaides and Greg Sterndale to form a new consultancy:

My extended family has been playing a card game called Thief for the past several years. It’s been passed along orally through the network of grandparents and retirees, but we cousins have really enjoyed playing it too! The stealing element is what makes it so competetive and fun. Trash talk is a key feature of the game.