Feed - Martin Fowler

Growing Expert Generalists 🔗

To grow Expert Generalists we need to focus attention on fundamentals rather tools. As an example, Unmesh, Gitanjali, and I describe a workshop [...]

LLMs bring new nature of abstraction 🔗

Like most loudmouths in this field, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the role that generative AI systems may play in software development. [...]

Assessing Expert Generalists 🔗

We have two crucial checkpoints for spotting — and then nurturing — expert generalists. Unmesh, Gitanjali, and I look at hiring and career [...]

Expert Generalists: three more characteristics 🔗

Unmesh, Gitanjali, and I finish our list of characteristics of an Expert Generalist by describing how these folks favor fundamental knowle [...]

Expert Generalists: first three characteristics 🔗

As computer systems get more sophisticated we've seen a growing trend to value deep specialists. But we've found that our most effective c [...]

Autonomous coding agents: A Codex example 🔗

In the past few weeks, multiple “autonomous background coding agents” have been released. Birgitta Böckeler tried out giving a task to Ope [...]

Should I still use analytics? 🔗

I set up Google Analytics on my site in 2010, and since then use it to track page views to my site. I only care about page views, which I find useful [...]

Bliki: Say Your Writing 🔗

Here's one of the best tips I know for writers, which was told to me by Bruce Eckel. Once you've got a reasonable draft, read it out loud. By doing [...]

Interviewed by James Lewis at goto Copenhagen 🔗

At goto copenhagen last year, my friend James Lewis interviewed me and Goto have just released the video. I talk about when I learned abou [...]

Refresh of Agile Threat Modeling 🔗

Threat modeling is a systems engineering practice where teams examine how data flows through systems to identify what can go wrong - a dec [...]

Building Custom Tooling with LLMs 🔗

Tools that treat diagrams as code, such as PlantUML, are invaluable for communicating complex system behavior. But Unmesh Joshi often wi [...]

Coding Assistants Threaten the Software Supply Chain 🔗

We have long recognized that developer environments represent a weak point in the software supply chain. Jim Gumbley and Lilly Ryan expl [...]

Function calling using LLMs 🔗

While LLMs excel at generating cogent text based on their training data, they may also need to interact with external systems. Kiran Praka [...]

Building TMT Mirror Visualization with LLM 🔗

Creating a user interface that visualizes a real-world structure — like the Thirty Meter Telescope's mirror — might seem like a task that [...]

Additional explanatory material for the Deepseek Overview 🔗

A couple of months ago, my colleague Shayan Mohanty published a technical overview of the series of papers describing the deepseek AI mode [...]

Guiding an LLM for Robust Java ByteBuffer Code 🔗

AI editors like Cursor can generate code with remarkable speed using LLMs, handling boilerplate and providing functional snippets for various [...]

Updating yesterday's post on social media engagement 🔗

Some people asked about how many people clicked through the links on these social media posts. I've added some more to the article, partly to [...]

Social Media Engagement in Early 2025 🔗

A few years ago, whenever I published a new article here, I would just announce it on Twitter, but since the Muskover its importance has d [...]

I've been kidnapped by Robert Caro 🔗

I've always enjoyed reading, and for most of my life I've particularly enjoyed reading history. I've head many great things about Robert C [...]

The role of developer skills in agentic coding 🔗

As agentic coding assistants get more capable, Birgitta Böckeler is trying them to change existing codebases. This has led to some impres [...]

Commenting on removing "X" on US passports 🔗

The new US administration has decided to eliminate the “X” option for gender/sex on passports. I have several non-binary friends, and I don’t see why [...]

GenAI Patterns: Fine Tuning 🔗

While RAG is the most common way to focus a foundation model on material outside its training set, Bharani Subramaniam and I now finish ou [...]

GenAI Patterns: Guardrails and RAG overview 🔗

Gen AI systems are gullible, and can easily be tricked into responding in ways that are contrary to an enterprise's policies or leak confi [...]

What role does LLM reasoning play for software tasks? 🔗

Recent LLM models have provided “reasoning” capabilities. Birgitta Böckeler asks what role these play with coding tasks. She doesn't have [...]

GenAI Patterns: Reranker 🔗

LLMs struggle with large amounts of context. Bharani Subramaniam and I explain how to mitigate this common RAG problem with a Reranker whi [...]

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