Let’s start with a thought experiment: imagine if every chef was required to publish their secret recipes by law. The culinary world would either become a utopia of shared knowledge or descend into anarchy of copycat carbonara. Now replace “chefs” with “AI developers” and “recipes” with “model weights” - welcome to the main course of today’s debate. The Current AI Kitchen: Secret Sauces and Mystery Meat Modern AI development often feels like watching a magic show where:...

When Your Microservices Need Marriage Counseling Testing microservices is like keeping a troupe of drama-prone actors in sync - miss one cue and the whole production collapses. Through years of wrestling with distributed systems (and occasionally crying in server rooms), I’ve catalogued battle-tested techniques that go beyond textbook examples. Unit Testing: The Art of Surgical Mocking Let’s start with the foundation. A well-isolated unit test is like a perfectly crafted espresso shot - small but potent....

The Clean Code Cult: When Perfect Becomes the Enemy of Good Confession: I’ve written code so clean it would make a preacher proud. But I’ve also shipped code so hacky it would make that same preacher weep. There’s a time and place for both. While Clean Code enthusiasts (and I use that term affectionately) bring valuable principles to the table, their dogmatic application often chokes startups with technical debt disguised as virtue....

Pharo is like a time machine for coding - it lets you travel through your program’s runtime while it’s still running. This modern Smalltalk dialect isn’t just a language; it’s an interactive world where your objects live, breathe, and respond to every keystroke. Let’s explore why you should give it a spin, and how to get started without losing your mind. Why Pharo? The Short Story of ‘Small Talk’ Smalltalk began as a research project at Xerox PARC in the 70s, aiming to make computers as easy to use as children’s toys....

Why Engineers Should Embrace Calculated Risk You know the drill: “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” But what happens when that ethos meets your codebase? Strategic technical debt isn’t about cutting corners - it’s about intentional trade-offs that balance short-term needs with long-term sustainability. Think of it as the software equivalent of burning the midnight oil to meet a critical deadline while planning an IV drip for the inevitable crash....