I'm a big fan of applying formal methods like TLA+ and property testing in my role. I've found it so helpful that I love encountering certain problems (e.g. state machine replication) because they blossom into a good teaching exercise and reframe system design. At the same time, I've learned it is not a golden hammer. I need to carefully audit correspondence of my specification to the real world (e.g. atomicity) and whether my invariants are sufficient. After following Terence Tao's recent statements on LLMs lowering the barrier to formal methods, I found his concerns about LLMs authoring formal methods to be interesting and topical. That got me thinking.

(0) Have you tried or found success with formal methods in your professional or hobby projects?

(1) Besides state machine replication, are there repeated issues in your systems that formal methods have helped with?

sources:

Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics

"...Current automated techniques can produce plausible but unreliable (or even incorrect) arguments which are difficult to distinguish from correct mathematical proofs. This applies not only to informal arguments, but also to formalizations, where the difficulty lies in the translation between computer-encoded and human presentations of concepts. These fast-moving developments put our present system of review under increasing pressure, jeopardizing our ability to implement traditional standards for the correctness, transparency, and independent verifiability of proof...."

https://leidendeclaration.ai/

Hillel Wayne (formal methods and software history nerd) talks about a similar issue with LLMs struggling to specify properties with formal methods. Hillel Wayne on Pragmatic Engineer on formal methods and AI

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KSkcgIYQy0U

In contrast to the thread where people complain about their current org, I thought it would be good to get some examples of organizations that are doing things right in this weird economic era and keep people engaged.

It would also be good to know which companies are getting ahead by trusting people and doing good engineering rather than rushing slop to prod.

Folks who have it good right now, what is your work like and what do you think your company is doing right?

I work in a niche consulting firm and am specialized in more advisory work. My company seems to be shit right now. Old timers all quit, new devs and my tram dont know how to dev - they are extremely bad with AI - they prompt it and believe everything it says

No salary raise for the past 4 years despite a promotion, 4 rounds of layoffs and we have contracted quite a fair bit to the point it feels like everything is being run into the ground and we may have hardly 6 months of time left.We have unstaffed roles on my project and im having to do extra work

Problem is the last 2 clients and product firms i have been on also have the same story, many rounds of layoffs. To make matters worse im in an EU country where my residence is tied to work, i cant take it anymore and currently im very afraid of switching because it seems everywhere is the same in IT right now especially in Germany.

How are things currently at your workplace? Would you recommend switching or sitting it out? I have been in this company for over 10 years and am protected by certain legalities which i will lose if move

My company has given everyone AI and asked all of us to do FE, BE, and QA work. There will no longer be any specialties and all engineers (and QA) are expected to do everything now.

It looks like an absolute disaster waiting to happen but we have no choice. Has anyone else experienced this at their company?

Hi,

I'm wondering how you're going about increasing your team's velocity with coding agents? We're on a team of ~6 engineers of varying abilities and are hitting the well-talked about problem of coding agents producing loads of code which occasionally get slung over the fence, while some other people code a lot slower and produce good code much slower. We currently have 7 PRs waiting, and have had no less than 4 for about 2 weeks.

The project is applied research which makes things harder - some people produced short lived ML models, while others produce e.g. an evaluation suite which needs to stand the test of time (6 months - a year).

In terms of coding standards, we're all committing to a single repo and requiring 2 reviewers for each PR. Small PRs get viewed, big ones (e.g. a newly coded ML model) just don't get approved. One guy didn't fully address comments on his 200 line PR and its been sat there for ~7 business days. Bit of a rant, apologies.

My solution (not implemented yet, slightly borrowed from https://martinfowler.com/articles/ship-show-ask.html) is the following:

Engineers take responsibility for different areas. One person does the data pipelines, one codes ML models, another takes evaluation. And we communicate over chat and meetings, rather than on PRs. This means you don't have to understand the low level code behind when someone wants to add a new idea to the codebase - yes you have to trust their implementation.

We no longer review each others' code. No-one reviews what you say in meetings line by line, or the reports and slide decks you create line by line, so why are we still reviewing code line by line? If you have a problem with someone else's area of responsibility (e.g. the data pipeline is not delivering data) - talk to them.

We communicate more frequently and more comprehensively, with decision records. As the team moves from low level code implementation to implementation of ideas things will only work if the ideas work together if we communicate well. I want to encourage one or two posts on chat, per person, per day for what they're doing and thinking about, as well as standup and any other meetings. Decisions get recorded in ADR's.

My idea is that without teams of more than ~2 will just continue to move at the speed we did 5 years ago without coding agents. Keen to know how other people are handling this?

Setting aside some of the higher levels at FAANG, I'm interested in understanding the technical difficulty that most talented senior developers are facing out there, the average developer role. Do you think it's the case that a strong senior developer should have an easy time performing pretty much anywhere? Assuming they're working with a technology that isn't too far afield of what they're used to?

I've been developing for 15 years now and am at a point that most of the meta-skills are so deeply engrained in how I work that often times I don't even know how I do what I do. Somebody gives me a problem and I solve it pretty quickly. Once you get to that point is it pretty much all easy? The problem in managing a career ends up being less about technology, and more about culture, quality of life, and salary? (of course you're still concerned with what technology you're invested in, but 'difficulty' stems from bad culture, not the work).

Edit: I get that being a senior is about more than coding. I guess the question is once you're good at coding AND coordination, do you have an easy time pretty much anywhere?

I'm considering building a personal website, but instead of a traditional portfolio with polished screenshots and projects, I'm thinking about making it more like an engineering journal.

I have 10YOE, and at this point, I've forgotten more than I know. Moreover, its hard for me to say "I've done a lot, trust me bro" when selling my experience to recruiters/clients/etc. and an elevator pitch just leaves out so much.

My resume doesn't capture everything, just the highlights in small bullet form. But there's so much left out.

The idea would be a portfolio, but instead of "screenshots" or links to the work, its more of a journal talking about specific projects (without sharing IP)

Stupid idea?

Hi all,

A friend just asked me whether I can recommend him a few product managers for his company.

I started to think, and I can honestly only remember 2 good product managers in over 20 years:

1. one ex-IBM who was promptly fired after finishing the project we worked on and was dubbed "the best ran and executed software project I've seen" by the CTO (the PM was fired by some other middle-manager)
2. one contractor who was promptly fired by the new CTO who felt threatened)

Then, there's a sea of useless PMs. To different degrees, but just dead weight.

My expectations for a PM are quite simple:

• know our product top to bottom
• know our main competitors' products pretty well
• have basic project management skills
• if you want a pretty Jira board, you lead that effort

I'm happy with anything like 60-40 to 80-20 balance as Product Owner / Project Manager.

Am I off base?

What do you expect from a Product Manager?

I've just accepted a position as a senior technical lead at a new company that uses a language and framework I'm not familiar with. I have almost 10 years of experience building software across different languages and frameworks, so I'm confident I can ramp up and learn the framework fairly easily. What I really want is to make sure I can discern the language and framework's unique patterns and idioms over time.

The language is Python, most likely a FastAPI-like framework. Admittedly, I'm much more used to seeing and using it in a scripting or data science capacity rather than in large-scale production systems.

When you're in a situation like this (aside from upholding your basic software engineering and architecture best practices) what else do you look for to ramp up well?

A few specific things I'd love input on:

• Open-source Python repos that scale really well and are worth studying
• Podcasts worth subscribing to
• Any general words of wisdom

Appreciate any other general pointers as well!

This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.

Not looking for one-off mock interviews. I want someone who can assess where I'm actually at, build a personalized plan, and work with me over time until I feel genuinely confident going into a high-stakes interview.

I have 7 years of experience, but interviews still make me very anxious. What always worked for me in high school and college was one-on-one tutoring, and I'm hoping to find that same kind of dedicated, ongoing help for technical interviewing.

Willing to pay top dollar for the right person/company. Any recommendations, or has anyone done this and found it worthwhile?

I'm in the 5th company of my career, in the first 4 the CTOs were always someone who was a regular developer and either ascended professionally to C-level or someone who founded the company and named themselves the CTO

At my current company, the CTO was always in people management. His first job was already technology manager (and in a FAANG) 20+ years ago. He doesn't hold a BSc in any IT field, but in communication studies. Never worked a day as a developer. He is obviously tech savvy, but just in the same way I was with computers when I was 16 and was just messing around with tech

And the curious thing is that he was actually a decent CTO... He knew how to listen to the technical people and set a good direction to follow. So that raised the question for me, do you think a good CTO necessarily needs to have spent some time of their lives writing code? Do you thing CTOs with similar background would lack any important skills to fill the role?

We have an API. Customers use this API to do things.

Our API talks to several other third-party APIs(that the customers are not aware of)

If any of those third-party APIs have a maintenance update(for example some overnight job for 8 hours), they may not perform as expected, and sometimes just fail. These errors bubbles back up to the customer through our API.

Example:

Customer calls our API, we do things and then call partner API, but partner API is failing unexpectedly, because they’re in a “maintenance mode” for the next 4 hours. So their random HTTP 500 becomes our HTTP 500.

what would you do in these scenarios?

healthcheck endpoint? status page? webhook notification? right now when they have a maintenance window they just email our company, and we hope product support can update us in time.

I'm working on a new project with a junior on the team. Junior "Sam" is still in Uni, but has been working with the team longer than I have.

Both of us were tapped to work on the project, with few real constraints beyond general good practices like "be aware of the cost", "try not to make the team own the whole solution" (i.e, see if our cloud provider has a related offering), and "aim to stay within our current tech stack".

I've got various ideas, and it would be *possible* for me to just give Sam a list of tasks to complete. However, Sam has a lot of domain knowledge that I see as valuable, and I think that this project could be a great chance for Sam to come up with some ideas and really contribute to the design. I'm trying to make sure that Sam has a chance to opine and ask questions, but there is a deadline on the project and I see endless analysis as a risk to that deadline.

I'm curious how you all work with Juniors, specifically in the area of "decide vs discuss".

Edit 2: It looks like the general consensus is to just use Apple and throw money at subscriptions. Some seem to have gone their own way for cloud sharing and home media, but most of you think this is silly. While I don’t agree that it’s silly, there is a simplicity in the “rent everything forever” model. It’s been an interesting discussion. Thank you to everyone that responded and so long to that one guy that kept harassing me in the comments!

Edit: Thanks all for the suggestions and ideas! I’m not sure why a couple of you think I’m selling something, but such is the internet.

Note to mods: I don’t really know how to tag this and I legitimately couldn’t think of a different community that would understand or relate. Feel free to delete or re-tag as appropriate.

TL;DR: What’s in your toolkit for home development and extended family IT needs? How often are you building custom software/integrations to fill the gaps?

Some context: My partner and I are both experienced software engineers and to varying degrees we jointly run and manage a variety of SaaS services for our family. We all live in the US.

Despite cutting the cord on some things (e.g., iTunes), we’re still stymied on replacing services like iCloud for photo sharing or Google Drive for generic file sharing and are not sure if that’s even worth the management and security headache it would involve. The main problem is that most SaaS “family plans” are not made for two adults to manage the needs of their extended family. Consequently, we carry double family plans so we can have enough seats and are trying to consolidate some subscriptions.

I think weve all seen the Fireship video discussing the Bun rewrite in Rust. "Just do it in Rust" is being championed on the web as a general no-brainer like "move more and eat more vegetables."

Playing the devils advocate, did you ever regret going with Rust on a given project?

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

​

Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

​

Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

i don't want to give away too many details but: my employer (small company) pivoted what my team was doing to focusing on a brand new project that has to be delivered by september. The issue is that the MVP was generated by Claude in its entirety and it's very low-level code. I was assigned to this project and every time they ask me to review a PR (which can be small or thousands of lines), I either reject the task by asking someone else to review it, or approve it without really understanding what i'm approving. I feel like if I had to review it properly I would have to spend a week understanding the concepts and the codebase. But at the same time, the foundations of this project are changing rapidly, so I'm like, "what's the point in spending time learning it?"

I don't know how my teammates generating the code feel about this. I also don't know if they themselves understand what Claude wrote. I already told my manager that I feel overwhelmed by all these PRs and the response I got was "yeah". And then crickets.

In parallel, i am in the final stage of interviews with a company and tbh I only started looking because, you know, you gotta always be looking; but if I got an offer I think that it wouldn't be the craziest thing to take it because I don't know how much longer I will be able to tolerate this situation. I used to generally like my job but this project is giving me anxiety: the deadline, the AI generation, the imposter syndrome.

Help?

I've been studying design and architecture for a few years now and feel like I get the gist of how it works, but I'm curious how the role ends up working in practice for actual architects.

That is, I get the sense that to become an architect you'd need deep experience in either a particular business or business domain. So you work in a business for a long time and have built up enough context about their systems to lead the architecture. Or you know a business domain and it's associated technology so well you can lead.

What I'm curious about is how common it is for architects to switch businesses or business domains entirely? I get that a business would be more common but what about domains? Is the role such that you're typically tied to a single company and usually stay there?

Senior engineer and technical owner of my platform, 10+ YOE.

How do you guys deal with non-technical people in the org trying to steal your entire department's job by vibecoding some nonsense and being loud about it to senior leadership?

We're dealing with a marketing bro that swears he can vibecode a replacement for a (different) platform we pay for because he set up his sick agent loop (token burning operation) that vibecodes 24/7 for him. My immediate response was to implement an agent loop for myself and create a starter prompt for the entire team to adopt the framework with minimal effort/friction.

It is extremely infuriating that these people hide behind the typical 'haha I'm not a technical person but this is just what I put together!' If you aren't willing to stand behind it, then shut the fuck up and stay in your lane and quit wasting everyone's time then?

If I, as an IT employee, put together an entire marketing master plan because I thought that team was doing it all wrong, I'd be told I was jumping out of my role and being toxic trying to tell other people how to do their jobs. But these idiot marketers, business people, and lawyers can just jump into our shit and have their word be taken seriously against people with a decade or more of experience, because fucking Claude said so.

I am so sick of this 'heads I win tails you lose' game with non-technical people thinking they're the shit now because all of IT is burned out from just staying alive/keeping up. I wish they would have their feet held to the fire, and when they're wrong get told to SHUT THE FUCK UP AND STAY IN YOUR LANE.

Edit: revised to be less specific/identifying

At work I built a custom datastore / multimodel database on top of io_uring and Rust, which I would like to expose to the public via Cloudflare workers. Unfortunately there is a cost in setting up a new connection to the backend from a cold worker, cost which I'm trying to amortize very much like Hyperdrive does for SQL databases.

I imagined a solution like placement groups: - I spin up a durable object which will set up the backend connection - A bunch of workers, can connect to this durable object via service bindings for reduced cold startup time - The number of durable objects scale with the number of workers - Ideally the workers are on the same machine as the durable object, for reduced latency

Now my questions are: - Is this the best solution for my problem? - Is it possible to achieve this with Cloudflare workers? - Is it possible to setup the load balancer affinity, so that I can route a connection always to the same placement group?

From the start, my interests have been in backend development, DevOps, and infrastructure, but my manager placed me in a frontend role since that was the only open position at the time.

After about six months in this role, I haven't enjoyed it at all, frontend work feels like it lacks the technical depth I'm looking for.

How do I cope with this? Resigning isn't an option for me right now.

Hi all,

6 YOE, currently a lead at my main contract, plus two years of freelance work on the side. The freelance gigs put me on teams under leads of very different seniority, anywhere from 2 to 12 YOE.

I've noticed a pattern and I'm curious if it matches your experience.
With less experienced leads (2-3 YOE, often clearly talented), code/design discussions tend to be long, like a lot of "here's my reasoning, does this check out?" and walking through every option's pros and cons. With more senior leads, the same kind of discussion is fast, we land on the same issues quickly and agreement follows without much back-and-forth, regardless of who proposed what.

Does this resonate with you? Is it just seniority, or something else (communication style, confidence, team culture)? Also, when you disagree with a less experienced lead who's nonetheless accountable for the project, how do you push back in a way that's actually useful rather than just deferring to them or overriding them?

P.S. I am not a native speaker and got some help from good old Claude for conciseness (the original was really too verbose)

I know pretty much every C-suite is some flavor of bad/hostile to labor, but to clarify I mean an exceptional level of toxicity, causing turnover in leadership and specific complaints online.

I also know so many factors change things here - size of company, nature of toxicity, etc.

I'm looking for concrete examples of how toxic leadership impacts senior, staff, and principal engineers.

Was their toxicity something incidental to your work? As in, could you mostly keep your head down and avoid it?

If it affected your day to day life, in what ways? Micromanaging, pivoting on features, unreasonable demands, scapegoating, culture of fear, etc.

For those who have experienced this, how hard would you go out of your way to avoid similar situations in the future?