How long will it take? Two days, tops. (It took eight.) 🧵👇 Image: MonkeyUser

What's a good code coverage number? 🧵👇 Three Google testing veterans put the company's position in writing in 2020, and it holds up. Their answer: the number matters less than what you do with it.

When I enter a building, I immediately know your software architecture. 🧵👇 Image: Manu Cornet (bonkersworld.net)

Best books for learning data structures and algorithms. 🧵👇 My go-to list, from "what's Big-O?" to actually understanding algorithms.

Sometimes experience helps; sometimes it hurts. 🧵👇 Image: Sketchplanations

What happens to jobs when companies actually adopt AI? 🧵👇 Most of what we see is predictions. Ramp and Revelio Labs published the first study linking firm-level AI spend to workforce data: 21,559 US firms, Jan 2021 to Feb 2026.

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. 🧵👇

Critical thinking is the skill that separates good developers from great ones. 🧵👇 The most valuable thing I took from a PhD wasn't research. It was learning how to actually think through a problem.

I lost a weekend sure another team broke our build to spite us. 🧵👇 Image: Sketchplanations

Friday Developers Fun 🤣 Just read the docs

Welcome to the Museum of Meaningless Metrics. 🧵👇 Image: Itamar Gilad

What does Cursor's new data say about how we code? 🧵👇 Most takes focus on speed. Their first Developer Habits Report points at a bigger shift: the work itself is changing shape.

Some people get promoted because they're not good technically. It's called the Dilbert principle. 🧵👇 Image: Dilbert, by Scott Adams

Most engineers reach for pessimistic locking by default. For read-heavy systems, that's usually the wrong call. 🧵👇

If you ask something online, sometimes no one answers. But there's a trick that gets an answer almost every time. 🧵👇 Image: xkcd 386 (xkcd.com/386)

How does email actually work? 🧵👇 We hit send and it arrives. Underneath is a system with no built-in auth and optional encryption, held together by 50 years of patches. ~376B emails/day, nearly half spam.

Coding agents don't reward the best coders. 🧵👇 Everyone assumed AI agents would favor the strongest engineers. Anthropic's analysis of ~400,000 Claude Code sessions points the other way.

If you work in software engineering, leadership, architecture, or career growth, my inbox is open. Questions, ideas, collaborations, or problems worth discussing: 📬 milan [at] milanovic [dot] com I share more here on BSky.

The best managers often run the most dysfunctional teams. 🧵👇 William Meijer drew it as two lines. One is kind lies, and it sinks. The other is unkind truths, and it slowly climbs.

11 techniques to be more productive than 95% of people. 🧵👇 A few things I use every day.

Friday Developers Fun 🤣 The illusion of AI productivity

Why "does the model write good code?" is the wrong question. 🧵👇 I watched Adam Bender's Google I/O talk this year and then called him, because he named the thing the AI coding debate avoids.

5 laws that every software developer should know. 🧵👇 We collect them like slideshow trivia, but they work better as predictions. Each names a failure you'll hit eventually.

JWT's biggest weakness is its flexibility. PASETO removes it. 🧵👇 The JWT spec lets the token specify which algorithm to trust. That choice is behind most JWT failures in production.

What happens when you depend on only one person on a team? 🧵👇 Image: Sketchplanations

Agents write 99% of my code now. I review 100% of it. 🧵👇 Three years ago, I copy-pasted from ChatGPT in a browser tab. Today I run several Claude Code sessions in parallel, each in its own git worktree.

Once we were late for a deadline, so we added two more engineers to speed things up. 🧵👇 Image: Work Chronicles

How does Google Maps find your route so fast? 🧵👇 A plain shortest-path search across a country's roads takes seconds per request. Maps answers in under a second. Most of the work happens before you type a destination.

Good ideas don't die from being wrong. They die waiting for approval. I've spent 20+ years at companies of every size, which is why I tend to favor small ones. 🧵👇

Great leaders take responsibility for their words, actions, and results. In good times and bad. But making people accountable is not easy (in Serbian we don't even have a word for it). The Accountability Ladder, created in 2007 by Bob Gordon, helps. 🧵👇