The local maxima we need to reach the next global maximum
Half-way through 2026, I’m finally getting around to posting some predictions for the year. Really, ideas about how software development can fix the house to deal with coding agents generating lots of code:
- Design with pacing, stable/unstable layers – ala Shearing layers
- Correctness by design/assertion – ala “Making Impossible States Impossible”
- Formal verification (finally) – figure out if we can do better than compilers and unit tests to know if what we asked for resembles what we received
- Even more deterministic static analysis – absent a leap forward in the practicality and ergonomics of formal verification, can we manage the flood plain of incoming code with beaver dams of linters, style checkers, and good old-fashioned
grep? - Improve our observability stance – how can we see the emergent properties of the running system, let alone iterate on them? And, can we do so without spending all our lunch money on observability services and stacks?
Notably absent from this list: guardrails, specs, swarms, optimization, maximalism, orchestration. These aren’t even local maxima, they’re just shiny objects or shovels someone is trying to sell us along the way.
Exploring the Rich History of Funk and Soul Music: A Journey Through Rhythm and Emotion:
Funk and soul music aren’t just sounds; they’re vibrant threads woven into the fabric of musical history. Emerging from the rich cultural tapestry of African American communities in the 20th century, these genres have become a cornerstone of musical innovation. They blend gospel’s fervor, jazz’s complexity, rhythm and blues’ groove, and rock’s edge to create a sound that moves both the heart and the feet. Here, we’ll dive into their roots, evolution, and the enduring influence they wield, keeping audiences captivated across the globe.
I couldn’t have introduced the funk better myself.
Related: Maggot Brain is highly rated but still underrated. That album could stand against any of Stevie Wonder’s “classic period” albums.
🛬Back from Spain. Vermouth de grifo, Hieronymus Bosch and Matisse, old buildings, and public green spaces are pretty great.
📚Still at it with Power Broker and the first six Dune novels. Larry McMurtry essays are making me a little nostalgic for the idea of Texas (but not contemporary Texas itself). Contemplating adding the giant book of all the Montaigne essays to this list.😎
🎥 Hoppers was fun and feels like possibly a return to form for Pixar. Mandolorian and Grogu isn’t the best or worst Star Wars, but it is fun and hits all the expectations.
📺 Rooster is great if you’ve ever fancied becoming a sharp-witted author and visiting professor in New England. Widow’s Bay is great if ever you’ve wondered what being the mayor of an obscure but definitely cursed island in the northeast might look like.
⭐I should call out Hacks here. That is how you end a series, a comedy in particular. I will now enthusiastically recommend this show to everyone as The Ideal Comedy television series. If you haven’t, go watch it. Five seasons, no skips or lulls.
Fits on a floppy, great idea:
Software has lost its way. Apps that once shipped on a single floppy disk now demand gigabytes of your storage, minutes of your time, and far too much of your patience. We accepted this gradual bloat, but that’s not progress.
Software should be as small as it can be. Not as a gimmick, but as a discipline. The floppy disk is the measuring stick: 1.44 MB. If the software that ran entire businesses could fit in that space, then a modern, focused, single-purpose tool certainly can.
Yep, these criteria make the good stuff:
Launches instantly. Faster startup, nothing unnecessary to load.
Does one thing well. Focused features, fewer bugs, software that lasts.
But, I disagree on some details:
Native only. No dependency bloat, every line of code earns its place.
I usually don’t feel like “native” is crucial these days. Whatever your definition of native is, it’s not a prerequisite for building great software. Even for desktop/mobile platform development using the vendor-intended language and frameworks, the downsides are…a lot, lately.
You can create software that is fast and focused with any language or stack if you’re careful. So, I might replace this one with something about attention to details and care for the craft.
Runs on older systems. Older devices deserve love too.
I love it when this happens. It’s easier to make it work outside native environments, too!
I think the applications are less important than the data. I’d change this one to something about the ability to store one’s own data on a floppy-sized local file instead of in an opaque cloud or a row in a SaaS database somewhere.
Maybe the big idea is that the application and data should fit on the floppy. 🤔
Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger is underrated. Twenty five years later, still no skips.
Previously in tech, the joke was that Microsoft’s org chart was a bunch of divisions in a Mexican standoff.
Fast-forward to now, instead of pointing guns at each other, every division at Microsoft is yoked to the other via KPIs and bonus allocations. None can maneuver freely enough to ship excellent software. They all have to prioritize “synergy” (Copilot everything!) and integration instead.
In retrospect, at least the drama of a standoff yielded the turnarounds of distributed systems and open source work in the 2010s.
Examples of The Eponymous Trifecta:
- “Black Sabbath” by Black Sabbath from the album Black Sabbath
- “Motörhead” by Motörhead from the album Motörhead
- “Iron Maiden” by Iron Maiden from the album Iron Maiden
Hopefully you’re starting to see the pattern. (There’s way more of these out there. Let me know your favorite!)
Let me throw some variety in:
- 🤷♂️ by Metallica from the album Metallica
- “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley from the album Bo Diddley
Ergo: You’re not metal if you don’t have a trifecta. Metallica is not metal. This is probably some kind of paperwork mistake.
But, Bo Diddley is metal. Just listen to the music, I think you’ll agree.
git-spice – stacked diffs, but without another (SaaS) tool to provision and pay for. Excellent ergonomics, if you’re comfortable with the git CLI as-is. I’ve tried this for one project so far, things went as hoped. Moving between commit ‘stacks’ is easy, and rebasing changes from the main branch is straightforward. This is the quality of tool I’d hope to see in git in the first place. But maybe that’s a 2026 expectation. 😇
When you’re stuck or uninspired, reach for your spark file:
This is why for the past eight years or so I’ve been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I’m going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be. There’s no organizing principle to it, no taxonomy–just a chronological list of semi-random ideas that I’ve managed to capture before I forgot them. I call it the spark file.
Steven Johnson, The Spark File
It’s a productive trick that doesn’t have an ecosystem of applications, courseware, and influencers wrapped around it. I dig that.
Adjacent: swipe files and commonplace books.
If you were wondering, “could anyone make OAuth2 an even more involved, jargon-filled process?”, the answer is yes. AT Protocol and Bluesky sure did. 🙃