Cate Huston · engineering leadership
Engineering an Interesting Life.
-
Attempting to reverse engineer code review
→: Attempting to reverse engineer code reviewI keep hearing complaints about code review. About volume, about quality, about trying to take responsibility for code produced by colleagues who have abdicated their responsibility for thinking and are uncritically hitting enter. But how much of that is just grumpiness? Frustration? “AI slop” is the new “I didn’t like it.” Code review was always…
-
Is the software factory working?
→: Is the software factory working?When we replatformed Twill, we built a software factory: agents write most of the code, a merge queue lands it, CI decides what gets through. Which means there’s a lot of activity, and every release I cut (several a week) includes a list of changes. But I need to know if the factory is working.…
-
Good Architecture Is a Function of Time
→: Good Architecture Is a Function of TimeEngineers, we use a lot of words to talk about architecture, but at a fundamental level, I think architecture is about making good decisions easier, on a timeframe you can reason about. → Small startups can’t reason about a long timeframe, so architecture has limited ROI.→ Banks have requirements around audit trails and – for…
-
Nine Months of The Spreadsheet: What AI Taught Me About How I Work
→: Nine Months of The Spreadsheet: What AI Taught Me About How I WorkIn February I wrote about The Spreadsheet: one tab per week, a column for each area of my life, and a green/yellow/red rating for impact and vibe. Every Monday I feed it to Claude and ask “how did I do?” and “what can I learn?” Nine months in, I’m still doing it. And with that…
The full archive