Thinking Above the Code
Leslie Lamport·2014·Microsoft Research·1 hr 7 minLamport on why writing a specification before you write code is the difference between engineering and guessing — and why TLA+ exists to make that possible.
Crafting quality that endures
Karri Saarinen·2025·Figma ConfigThe Linear CEO on why software quality is something a company has to value out loud — and how Linear's process keeps the bar from drifting as it scales.
Design in Practice
Rich Hickey·2023·Clojure ConjAfter years of talking about design in the abstract, Hickey demystifies the actual practice — the concrete moves and habits that turn 'design' from a noun into a verb.
The Wet Codebase
Dan Abramov·2019·DeconstructAbramov on what DRY actually costs once you've lived with a too-clever abstraction — and why writing the same code twice is sometimes the right answer.
Distributed Systems Are a UX Problem
Tyler Treat·2018·QConTreat reframes consistency, latency, and partial failure as user-facing concerns — and shows what good distributed-system UX looks like.
The Language of the System
Rich Hickey·2017·Clojure ConjHickey on the fact that the language inside your process is rarely the language between your processes — and what that should imply for system design.
Spec-ulation
Rich Hickey·2016·Clojure ConjHickey on versioning, breaking changes, and the quiet violence we do to downstream users when we 'fix' our APIs in place.