There are a few people I recommend following to understand what is going on with software development:
- Martin Fowler is probably my best reference in software engineering, both from the low-level Design Patterns point of view (where he made his fame), to more processes oriented and the more recent AI impact on the development processes. Even academics would agree with me on this one.
- James Governor (Redmonk) do a more industry-wide macro view of the software development trends. They advise big companies on what route to take, and they estimate the money involved in these new trends. I would hire them if I was running a SaaS or devtools-focused VC. I met James last year at LisbonAI, and there is a large contrast between his wacky style and the sobriety of his writing.
- Simon Willisson has been the new person in terms of AI development. I follow Simon since before Django had a 1.0 release, and he has become the reference in terms of AI development. He even has a paid newsletter with less content. Simon focus more on the exploratory side, and less on the engineering side, although he has started to document agents design patterns.
The fourth spot on my Mount Rushmore is up for debate. Tim Bray would blog a lot about the organizational side of things, but has now retired from that. I used to love the writing of Steve Yegge, but I think he has drank too much of his own cool aid.
The new kid on the block for me is Mitchell Hashimoto. He has the technical background — Vagrant, Terraform and Ghostty — and he does not mind sharing his path.
Specifically, I think two of his recent blog posts were what every developer needs to read:
Historically, the effort required to understand a codebase, implement a change, and submit that change for review was high enough that it naturally filtered out many low quality contributions from unqualified people. For over 20 years of my life, this was enough for my projects as well as enough for most others.Unfortunately, the landscape has changed particularly with the advent of AI tools that allow people to trivially create plausible-looking but extremely low-quality contributions with little to no true understanding. Contributors can no longer be trusted based on the minimal barrier to entry to simply submit a change.
— Vouch, an open source tool to explicitly keep track of trust in open source repos.
Agents will more readily pick open and free software over closed and commercial. At the time of writing this article, this is an objective truth. Independent research labs running experiments on popular models have found repeatedly that under diverse circumstances, models pick open and free alternatives over commercial. So far.
— The Building Block Economy, which gives you a new perspective on the impact of LLMs on the software development economy and tooling.