Collection · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts

Things People Say on Podcasts About Hands-On Engineering Podcasts

Podcasts where working engineers talk about actually building software: languages and frameworks, infrastructure and cloud, databases, testing, debugging, performance, and open source. Practitioner craft rather than industry news or management.

Everything worth repeating from the Hands-On Engineering Podcasts shows we follow. Updated every day — free to search and free to use, attribution included on every card.

The publications behind these quotes →
55
Quotes
102
Shows read
8
People quoted

Latest

Search all quotes →
“Shenzhen is not the arena, actually. Shenzhen is like the supermarket. Imagine you're a chef, you go to the supermarket to get the best parts, but your battlefield is not in Shenzhen. Your arena is somewhere else.” — Eric Pan, The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast “For the last 18 years, we're trying to help people to build hardware. But for the last three to four years, I think we are trying very hard to convince people not to build hardware.” — Eric Pan, The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast “I'm okay with not looking at the code as long as you're doing other things to make sure the system is operating correctly, and that you're thinking critically about how the system needs to change and evolve. If you're just not looking at the code and you're not caring about those other things, well, then you deserve everything that's going to happen to you.” — Sam Newman, The Pragmatic Engineer “Would I use that as defense against a distributed denial of service attack? No, because then your distributed denial of service attack becomes a distributed denial of cash attack.” — Sam Newman, The Pragmatic Engineer “It's just a tool in a toolbox. I've described microservices as being an architecture of last resort.” — Sam Newman, The Pragmatic Engineer “There's a lot more that people are trying to shove in as requirements than there ever was before. And it's because AI is making it possible time-wise, but people are still people at the end of the day and only have a finite amount of time and energy and focus. And that's not really being accounted for in this new era.” — Paige Niedringhaus, Front-End Fire “If you look at the post-mortem of the Hugging Face incident, it was described ... as I think like having 10,000 drunk house robbers show up all at once. And that sounds like a very chaotic scene. But I think that might kind of perfectly encapsulate where we are at the moment.” — Chris Swan, The InfoQ Podcast “We've also seen projects where rewrites in Rust have introduced new logical flaws because, okay, you get memory safety, but it doesn't mean that everything's invulnerable. ... Getting memory safety from the hardware is ultimately going to be a lot cheaper than redoing all of the software.” — Chris Swan, The InfoQ Podcast “Nine years of usage of this product, and you never once felt compelled to become a paying customer of it. In a way, I'm not building the next generation of CodePen for you. I'm not. I can't do that. That's stupid. That's a bad business decision. I need to make a new CodePen for new people that aren't you that might be compelled to pay.” — Chris Coyier, Shop Talk Show “We're starting to learn again that code, the velocity of coding was never truly the problem in our systems. You can make a whole lot of features and give them a QA and they're just going to be swamped.” — Jack Herrington, Front-End Fire “This is the classic don't be a meat proxy problem. Don't make someone else talk to your AI through you.” — Jamison Dance, Soft Skills Engineering “We are walking into a tidal wave right now that is washing up on shore. And that tidal wave is AI-generated code. And I am convinced that we cannot oppose this tidal wave. We have to find a way to live with this volume, with this new way of writing code. And we cannot insist on the old way of carefully reviewing every line.” — Dave Smith, Soft Skills Engineering “There's one really simple heuristic, which is how many prompts did it take to get the document to its current state? And if the answer is less than, I don't know, 20, then you probably have a crap document when it comes to design docs, planning docs, large ticket planning docs, things like that.” — Dave Smith, Soft Skills Engineering “I would love to go through the last 12 months of our podcast of being like, yeah, I can write the code, but you still need to review it. Or yeah, you can get help with tab completions, but you still need to review. … The level of cope that we've had over the years. Do you think that after the year we have had that it's going to just stop where it is?” — Wes Bos, Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski) “It's like explaining our motivations to a rabbit, like explain to a rabbit why we built a skyscraper. It doesn't make any sense, right? Because it's just not the universe they're in. And so what I worry is that AI is going to become to us what we are to animals.” — Steve Klabnik, Fallthrough “If you want good feedback on something, you can tell your chatbot, hey, my colleague who uses ChatGPT way too much wrote this text. Let's tear it apart. And then the sycophantic robot will defend you against the terrible writing of your colleague, which, of course, was just the text you wrote before with it.” — Adam Smith, Embedded “A lot of the things that people are talking about doing with AI are things that no one should have had to do in the first place. They're being done because we've created such a bad programming environment that nobody wants to interact with it anymore.” — Casey Muratori, The Standup with ThePrimeagen “We don't allow pull requests for issues that are older than a week. So if an issue is older than a week, it means that implementation is not the blocker. If I could solve that by putting an agent at it, then I would have solved it already.” — José Valim, Maintainable “A radiologist who examines x-rays and gets a second opinion from the AI when the AI disagrees is doing their job at a higher degree of fidelity, and that stops people from dying of cancer. Versus the radiologist who sees nine-tenths of their colleagues fired and who then has to review 100 times as many x-rays that the AI has vetted and says are cancer-free. If the AI is wrong 3% of the time, they're probably going to miss all of it and then people are going to die. … That's the social arrangement of the machine, not the technical capabilities of it.” — Cory Doctorow, Software Engineering Daily “If you're anti-Linux desktop growth, then what are we trying to do here with free software? What was the whole purpose of making something that was making the information free to the world? … Are we just trying to create a clubhouse that's just big enough for us to hang out in, that we can pretend like the rest of the world doesn't exist?” — Chris Fisher, LINUX Unplugged “Anybody that investigates airline crashes for a living is going to have a distorted view of reality, where they think airplane crashes are much more frequent than they actually are… I think this is also what's happening to people working at these frontier labs.” — Kris Brandow, Fallthrough “In Van Halen's heyday, on their tour rider, they said: in the green room we need a big jar of M&Ms and we want all the green ones picked out. Everybody's like, that's the height of total rock and roll debauchery. No — they did that for a reason. Their rider included all of this really important health and safety stuff, pyrotechnics and stage safety… So if they got to the green room and they see green M&Ms in the bowl, you can't do the fire. Those little non-sequiturs are my Van Halen green M&Ms.” — Brad Frost, Whiskey Web and Whatnot “The overlap of problems that are easy enough that they are suitable for someone who is learning to do, and hard enough that an LLM can't just one-shot it, is close to the empty set now.” — Ron Minsky, Signals and Threads “We don't want to be the new waterfall.” — Cassie Shum, Thoughtworks Technology Podcast “For so long, my policy has been it is cheaper to just buy more hard drives than to figure out what it is safe to delete, but the math may have flipped on that one.” — Allan Jude, 2.5 Admins “Humanoids just aren't quite ready for the home yet. They're a huge safety hazard.” — Aaed Musa, Embedded “…One example is an agent implemented some feature to copy some text. It wrote beautiful tests. The PR looked great. But when I went to check out the changes on the dog fooding app, when I copied it, it copied the whole markdown.” — Mark Goldstein, React Native Radio “…I can make the claim that TDD is for humans, not robots.” — Ben Rady, Two's Complement “…I think ironically, we're at the point where the thing that was built to generate text, the thing we needed to do the least is generate text.” — Kris Brandow, Fallthrough “…I'm not wasting my time reading things that you didn't waste your time writing.” — Matthew Sanabria, Fallthrough

Most Quoted Here

Sam Newman 3 Kris Brandow 3 Wes Bos 2 Jamison Dance 2 Dave Rupert 2 Chris Coyier 2 Scott Tolinski 2 Dave Smith 2