Finds · Books, Talks & Tools Worth Your Time
A small library of things worth your time.
Books, talks, and tools I keep coming back to and recommending to my colleagues and students.
Cleverbot
That's how chatbots were when the world was simpler.
Show your Work
This book has shaped modern creator and developer culture like almost no other book. It takes away the fear of the 'perfect product' and shows why it is much cooler (and more successful) to openly share your daily learning process online.
Various LLM smells
An interesting look at the typical, recurring patterns ('smells') of AI-generated content. From certain sentence structures in writing to always identical design elements on websites.
Nobody cares about your blog.
A short, honest post about why nobody reads your blog and why you should keep writing anyway.
Choose Boring Technology
An absolutely timeless essay that coined the concept of “innovation tokens.” It brilliantly explains why, in real production operations, you should rather rely on boring, proven technology instead of chasing every hype.
highlight.js
An extremely practical tool to cleanly format program code for presentations (e.g., in PowerPoint) and provide it with syntax highlighting.
The Mess We're In
A brilliant talk by the creator of Erlang. With plenty of charm, he dissects the absurd complexity of modern software stacks and explains why we are sitting on a house of cards made of misunderstood code.
FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition
A legendary masterclass in over-engineering. It’s a hilarious, satirical look at what happens when you apply every corporate software pattern imaginable to a 10-line coding challenge.
AI slop? What about human slop?
A critical essay arguing that bad and messy code ('slop') is not an invention of AI models, but has always been a human problem, and how to solve it.