A decent amount of digital ink has been spilled about the future of software engineering in light of increasingly powerful coding agents. Will software engineers, especially junior ones, be able to find jobs in the future as coding agents become more powerful? I’m not a futurist, so I’ll make some observations informed by my own increasingly productive use of coding agents like Claude Code and Aider: Today’s best coding agents still very much require a human operator, To effectively use...| N=1 (marcua’s blog)
This week a fellow B12er was performing an ad-hoc data analysis. They had a spreadsheet with some data, and wanted to classify the rows in the spreadsheet by a few different criteria along which they would look for trends. For an engineer, this would have been a quick Python script wrapping some classifier (in our case, the OpenAI API), but there wasn’t an engineer available for the project. We looked at some third-party plugins for Google Sheets, but it wasn’t clear what sorts of guarant...| N=1 (marcua’s blog)
Quick reminder: ayb makes it easy to create databases, share them with collaborators, and query them from a web application or the command line. I’ve been working on it for a few years, and am newly pushing myself to more publicly discuss releases, so here goes!| N=1 (marcua’s blog)
Relational databases are in their sixth decade, and the database community is understandably celebrating and reflecting on its accomplishments. In two wonderful pieces, Donald Chamberlin shared his perspective on the past half-century, and Eugene Wu shared thoughts on where we can go from here. At a time of reflection on relational database management systems as a largely solved problem, I’m struck by a painful contrast: databases are more powerful than they’ve ever been, but the average ...| N=1 (marcua’s blog)
For many reasons, it’s time for me to leave X/Twitter. I haven’t been meaningfully active on the platform for a while now, using it largely to boost company announcements and otherwise trying to rebuild my social network on Mastodon and Bluesky. But now even that restricted use case feels irresponsible. We have to pick which companies and products deserve the privilege of our attention, and for me, X has not been one of those companies for a while.| N=1 (marcua’s blog)
In 2019, I reconnected with books. This is largely thanks to Libby, the app that made it easy to check out and read books, and the New York Public Library, from which I got a free card.| N=1 (marcua’s blog)
Introduction| N=1 (marcua’s blog)
Preserving a piece of digital history| N=1 (marcua’s blog)
Introduction| N=1 (marcua’s blog)
tl;dr: part 1 explains what an explanation algorithm is, and part 2 describes an open source SQL data differ.| N=1 (marcua’s blog)