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Everything filed under Engineering, newest first.
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Phyllotaxis: An audio-reactive LED display
A build write-up of an audio-reactive LED sculpture that maps Fibonacci phyllotaxis onto a physical light array—math, fabrication, and real-time reactive firmware.
7 min · 1,644 words
Small Decisions: Engineering a Leading Model
AWS engineer Marc Brooker recounts building and training a small leading model hands-on—what worked, how it performed, and what the exercise taught him about modern model-building.
9 min · 2,024 words
Design eng hiring guide — part 1: defining the role
A practical part-one guide to hiring design engineers: why the role exploded, three common archetypes across the design landscape, and how company stage shapes what “design engineer” actually means.
11 min · 2,538 words
What I believe about the future of software development
Thorsten Ball plants a flag on where software development is headed as AI agents write more of the code: what still matters for engineers, what gets commoditized, and how taste and judgment become the scarce skills.
4 min · 809 words
What makes software development engineeringA process that doesn't depend on individual brilliance
Simon Park (박성범) argues software work becomes engineering when processes outlast individual brilliance—translating intuition into explainable practice, and clarifying when an engineering approach is actually needed.
12 min · 2,720 words
“They had no concept of a duty of care to their users.”
Marcin Wichary reflects on software craft and quality through the lens of duty of care to users—drawing on design and tooling history to ask what it means when products treat people as afterthoughts.
3 min · 664 words
KiCad Version 10.0.7 Release Candidate 1 Available
KiCad announces the first release candidate for 10.0.7, with testing builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux ahead of the stable point release.
1 min · 199 words
HardenedBSD August / September 2026 Status Report
Shawn Webb's HardenedBSD status update covering src hardening work ahead of quarterly release engineering, pkgbase guidance, and recent security-relevant cherry-picks from FreeBSD.
5 min · 1,068 words
I listened to the recent Ezra Klein interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which seems to be something of a Rorschach test for AI doomerism: if you are inclined to see doom, Jensen sounds dismissive, but if you (like me) do not fear for the future of humanity at the (metaphorical!) hands of a computer program, Jensen’s responses seem very reasonable. (With some exception: does this guy really not
3 min · 748 words
Accelerated Out of Core Shuffling
Benjamin Zaitlen explains RapidsMPF’s reusable out-of-core shuffler for distributed analytics—how spilling turns shuffle OOM headaches into a budgetable resource, and what it takes to push shuffle bandwidth toward terabytes per second.
15 min · 3,466 words
Replacing the old battery on rechargeable bike lights
Julia Evans walks through repairing decade-old rechargeable bike lights by replacing the battery at a makerspace—opening the case, identifying the cell, soldering a replacement, and what she learned as a non-electronics expert.
4 min · 1,011 words
Postgres AT TIME ZONE 'UTC' does NOT do what you think it does
A practical Postgres footgun: AT TIME ZONE 'UTC' converts timestamptz to timestamp without time zone—so month math and equality break unless you apply AT TIME ZONE twice.
2 min · 538 words
The Normalization of Inexplicable Failures
A critique of software and systems that routinely fail in ways nobody can explain—and how we've come to treat opaque breakage as normal rather than a design failure.
4 min · 942 words
Reverse-engineering the vintage Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC
Ken Shirriff reverse-engineers the Intel 8087's tangent microcode and shows why the chip's approach goes beyond classic CORDIC—covering range reduction, the argument reduction trick, and what the die reveals about 1980s floating-point design.
32 min · 7,343 words
Can we have reachability properties in TLA⁺?
Andrew Helwer asks whether TLA⁺ can express reachability properties the way model checkers often do, and explores what it would take to add them without breaking TLA⁺'s temporal-logic foundations.
12 min · 2,733 words
Mixture of Experts (MoE) for Backend Engineers
A detailed visual guide to token routing, expert batching, weighted combination, and the memory and communication tradeoffs of MoE serving. Suppose a model has dozens of feed-forward subnetworks, but each token uses only two of them. The arithmetic per token can stay modest while the total weight set grows. Now place that model on eight GPUs. If every GPU stores all experts, memory can become the limit; if experts are split across GPUs, token activations must travel to whichever GPU owns their…
15 min · 3,515 words
Keep if clauses side-effect free
Lawrence Kesteloot argues that if-conditions should not enqueue work, mutate state, or hide control flow—keeping the predicate a pure question makes code easier to read, test, and refactor.
2 min · 494 words
Getting out of the way: my robotics crash course
Software engineer Rob Bercik documents a crash course with a desktop robot arm: why LLM-era builders should get out of the way, what broke first, and what physical loops taught him.
8 min · 1,842 words
Improving site performance by shipping more CSS
GitHub’s Primer team recounts fully migrating github.com off CSS-in-JS to CSS Modules—feature flags, sx-prop cleanup, theming, and the performance wins along the way.
3 min · 723 words
Arm & SoftBank: Part 1 — Masa comes calling, bearing gifts
Today, something a little different: a joint post in the form of a conversation between Jon Metzler and Babbage.
11 min · 2,555 words