The Curious Engineer

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Matt Blodgett

mattblodgett.com

Matt Blodgett on topics occasionally germane to software development.

Engineering management / careersSoftware / engineering practice

’10’15’20’25
Posts
306 from 3 Mar 2007 to 21 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (12 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
http://feeds.feedburner.com/mattblodgett

2026 10

  1. Remember Refactoring?
  2. When Will GenAI's "Big One" Happen?
  3. Have Your Claude Call My Claude
  4. The Reverse Centaur
  5. Dysfunctional In a Chill Way
  6. A Human Writes This Blog
  7. Who Wrote This Crap?
  8. Don't Mess With Delivery
  9. User Advocate vs. Front-End Engineer
  10. Above All Else, Sustainability

2025 12

  1. Agile as Progressive Enhancement
  2. Legibility
  3. The Financial Architecture of Software
  4. Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast
  5. Sprints Balance Consistent Delivery With Optimal Value
  6. Sprints Need a Cooldown
  7. There's a Fine Line Between Increasing Productivity and De-skilling
  8. Calibrating Your Care
  9. Don't Let an LLM Write Your Unit Tests
  10. Copilot Is Outsourcing 2.0
  11. Engineering-led Research Tickets
  12. Software Engineer Career Levels at Companies You've Heard Of

2024 12

  1. Heisenberg Effect in Software
  2. Are You a Stable or Volatile?
  3. Who Writes the Backlog?
  4. Legacy Systems Age in Reverse
  5. Scrum Tensions: Code Review
  6. Scrum Tensions: Manual QA
  7. Continuity of Leadership
  8. Daring to Care
  9. Movin' Tickets
  10. Vision
  11. A Standup Free of Should, Probably, and Hopefully
  12. How Many Spikes Is Too Many?

2023 12

  1. Escaping the Bikeshed
  2. Make Your Thing Work Like the Thing Everyone Knows
  3. Tell Us Why We’re Doing This
  4. Slow Is a Superpower
  5. The Experience to Say "I Don't Know"
  6. Contextualizing the 1-on-1
  7. Clean Pull Requests
  8. Lunch & Learns
  9. The Yin and Yang of Technical Personalities
  10. Let Unsustainable Things Fail
  11. Tech's COVID Hangover
  12. The AI Can't Destroy Anything Worth Preserving

2022 12

  1. Prototypes Live Forever
  2. RIP Fred Brooks
  3. What Is a Staff Engineer?
  4. Remote Hiring and the Paradox of Choice
  5. Swamped to Sustainable
  6. Documentation Is a Competitive Advantage
  7. New People Write the Best Documentation
  8. Let developers do "off the board" work
  9. Penny-wise and Pound-foolish
  10. Ron Jeffries on Prediction
  11. Bring Engineers Problems, Not Solutions
  12. Finish Things

2021 12

  1. Challenging the Pull Request Orthodoxy
  2. Methodologies Are Descriptive, Not Prescriptive
  3. Incomplete, with high quality
  4. Career Philosophy: Product vs. Infrastructure
  5. Include the Thing
  6. Showing Up for Remote Work
  7. Your Wiki Has Expired
  8. Goals, Not Tasks
  9. Code as Inventory
  10. User Story or QA Story
  11. Selling Technical Debt
  12. User Story or Manager Story

2020 12

  1. How do we do remote work across time zones?
  2. Is Colocation Still Relevant to Agile?
  3. The Golden Rule of Interviewing
  4. Start with a Walking Skeleton
  5. 2020: The Watershed Year for Remote Work
  6. Autonomy: Not Just the Good Parts
  7. Does this feel sustainable?
  8. Maximize the Amount of Work Not Done
  9. Does this feel agile?
  10. Keep Code Reviews Focused on the Code
  11. "Environmental Issue"
  12. Process Bikeshedding

2019 12

  1. Documentation as Code
  2. Breaking Work Into Chunks That Users Care About
  3. You Test In Production
  4. Deliver Us From Estimation
  5. Retro Grade
  6. Discipline Is a Limited Resource
  7. How Do I Convert Story Points to Hours?
  8. I Prefer to Read the Classics
  9. The Psychology of Story Points
  10. Quality Assistance
  11. My Job Went to the Cloud
  12. Job Ad Red Flags: “Unlimited Vacation”

2018 12

  1. Career Philosophy: Stack Chasers vs. Evergreens
  2. The Enterprise Archaeologist
  3. Risky Business
  4. Opportunistic Agile
  5. Some Thoughts on QA
  6. Conway’s Law & Remote Teams
  7. The Harsh Light of Remote Work
  8. The private office is dead, long live the private office!
  9. Humane Offices: The HN List (April 2018)
  10. The Know-not-all Developer
  11. The Professional Buzzkill
  12. Ownership

2017 12

  1. Software Development Methodologies as Collective Fictions
  2. Inclusive Culture, Minimum Culture
  3. Job Ad Red Flags: Calling All Ninjas!
  4. Don’t Trap Your Clients in the Bikeshed
  5. Job Ad Red Flags: Fad Obsession
  6. Job Ad Red Flags: Technical Minutiae
  7. Job Ad Red Flags: “Passion”
  8. The Past Needs You
  9. Opportunistic Programming
  10. The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Developer Interviews
  11. Small Diffs and Code Reviews
  12. Different Strokes for (Remote) Folks

2016 15

  1. If You Can Lean, You Can Clean
  2. Be the Automator
  3. A Healthy Disdain for Technology
  4. Humility in Software Development
  5. Is Your Codebase a Hotel Room or a Home?
  6. Apple’s Flat Design: When Clarity Goes Out of Style
  7. Developer-on-Developer Crime
  8. Stop Validating Phone Numbers
  9. Money Talks
  10. Any Questions for Us?
  11. CX: Candidate Experience
  12. What Does a Tech Company Look Like?
  13. Humane Offices: MathWorks
  14. Late Night Heroes
  15. When 10x is 0x

2015 24

  1. Humane Offices: SAS
  2. Humane Offices: Epic Systems
  3. Open Plan Alternatives: Gleaming the Cube
  4. Open Plan Alternatives: Ask Your People
  5. Integration Is Communication
  6. Martin Fowler, Perks, and Remote Work
  7. The Yacht Metaphor for Software Organizations
  8. “That’s Easy. You Just…”
  9. Backlog Prioritization Affects Developer Morale
  10. If You Don’t Buy the Philosophy, Don’t Bother with the Practices
  11. The Library and the Bazaar
  12. Technicians Get No Respect
  13. Are Software Developers Respected by “Business People”?
  14. Just Wear Headphones
  15. The "Phone Room"
  16. How to Make Your Open Plan Office Suck Less
  17. Remote Work Denial Is a Bad Look
  18. Continuous Delivery and Management Pathologies
  19. Your Problem Is Not Unique
  20. Should Managers Share an Update in the Standup?
  21. What Would Christopher Alexander Think of Remote Work?
  22. The Open Plan Office and the Extrovert Ideal
  23. But Where Do People Work in This Office?
  24. People Hire Clones of Themselves

2014 1

  1. How I Work Remotely

2013 2

  1. Introducing Kenny
  2. The Boy Scout Rule

2011 3

  1. DHH on Hiring Remote Workers
  2. TLC on Software Methodologies
  3. The Microsoft Stack Did Not Kill MySpace, People Did

2010 1

  1. I know the Internet inside out

2009 12

  1. PowerShell Tip: Pipe to the Windows Clipboard
  2. Wired | Tired | Expired
  3. The State of ORM at Microsoft
  4. Inherits="WTF?"
  5. RottenFlix Live!
  6. Rotten Tomatoes + Netflix + Greasemonkey = RottenFlix
  7. Advertising is Failure
  8. On the Market
  9. Ruby Inspires Great Code
  10. IKEA v. the Amish
  11. Testing ScribeFire
  12. Pop the 'Why?' Stack

2008 63

  1. TDD and Double Entry Bookkeeping
  2. Rails! And BDD! And OS X! (Oh My!)
  3. Now Hiring: Ruthlessly Honest Dick
  4. Mission Accomplished
  5. I Gotta Give This Seaside Thing a Try
  6. JITting CSS?
  7. The American Gothic of Book Covers?
  8. I'm So Glad Uncov is Back
  9. The Mystery of Run -> "firefox"
  10. PowerShell Tip: Get Synopses for All Built-in Cmdlets
  11. Twitter Links: Let Your Smart Friends Filter Stuff for You
  12. Looping Is An Anti-Pattern
  13. Design Patterns: Making C++ Suck Less
  14. Freebase Parallax
  15. Zed on Feed Readers
  16. OFF-TOPIC: This is underground rap (Muxtape)
  17. If It Hurts, Do It More Often
  18. Select Quotes from Peopleware, Part 4
  19. Select Quotes from Peopleware, Part 3
  20. OFF-TOPIC: This is post-punk (Muxtape)
  21. Select Quotes from Peopleware, Part 2
  22. How I Got Started in Software Development
  23. Select Quotes from Peopleware, Part 1
  24. Where's the N-ovation?
  25. If you think the world needs better software managers, then...
  26. West Michigan Day of .NET 2008 Recap
  27. We've Turned XML Into A Crappy Programming Language
  28. Great Blog Series on Purely Functional Programming for Mere Mortals
  29. Great Article for People Not Sold on Ruby on Rails
  30. Bolt of Lightning #1 of ∞
  31. West Michigan Day of .NET 2008
  32. Wired | Tired | Expired
  33. Blodgett's Comprehensibility/Flexibility Hypothesis
  34. Am I More Interesting on Twitter?
  35. Automatically Generate Unit Tests from Unhandled Exceptions
  36. Long Job Titles
  37. Can We Use IronRuby Yet?
  38. I Could Never Work At Google
  39. List of Book Lists
  40. This Blog Has Moved!
  41. Be the Change You Want to See in the World
  42. Three Simple Rules for Career Satisfaction
  43. Great Hackers and Boring Work
  44. Firefox Tip: Get Spell Checking on All Form Fields
  45. Corollaries to Blodgett's First Law
  46. Paul Graham on Office Space for Hackers
  47. If Something Seems Boring, Skip It
  48. ^\d+ ?[A-Za-z]+s$ is Officially Played Out
  49. Matt Blodgett's First Law of Software Development
  50. Code Samples From "Programming Ruby" That Made Me Stop, Look Up At the Ceiling, and Sigh Longingly (Part 2)
  51. Code Samples From "Programming Ruby" That Made Me Stop, Look Up At the Ceiling, and Sigh Longingly (Part 1)
  52. IronRuby Caveats
  53. TDD as Part of Your Marketing Pitch
  54. Get Your Yegge "Thumbs Up!" T-Shirt
  55. Methods Are Not Just a Means of Reuse
  56. Books
  57. Subtle Usability Improvements in Vista
  58. A NuSoft Spotting in CodeSmith Studio
  59. Adding Blog Posts to Google Reader Shared Items without Subscribing
  60. Important Blog Posts, Part 3
  61. Reg Is Really Making Me Think Lately
  62. Drag-and-Drop Taskbar Buttons with Taskbar Shuffle
  63. Rails _Has_ A Ghetto

2007 67

  1. Important Blog Posts, Part 2
  2. Ruby on Rails Shops in Grand Rapids, MI
  3. Important Blog Posts
  4. Perfect Design Is Asymptotic
  5. Native IntelliSense for SQL Server Management Studio 2008
  6. I Can't, in Good Conscience, Ignore TDD for Much Longer
  7. Notepad++ Tip: Syntax Highlighting for ASP.NET Files
  8. Gently Chirping Crickets
  9. Vetting New Technologies
  10. Brain Food 11-9-2007
  11. The Future and Viability of IronRuby
  12. The Obliterator Pattern
  13. The Ultimate Reference for .NET Regular Expressions
  14. Technical Debt
  15. Greatness
  16. They Got Rob Conery, Too !?!?
  17. Brain Food 10-26-2007
  18. Visual Studio Tip: Navigate Backward/Forward
  19. Easy Notifications with System.Media.SystemSounds
  20. Debuggers Considered Harmful?
  21. Web 2.Overload
  22. What's It Like to Be a Web Developer?
  23. ASP.NET DropDownList for the 50 States
  24. ReSharper Tip: Go to File by Name
  25. Dear Twitter
  26. Problems Debugging ASP.NET Apps in Vista
  27. Use Firefox to Debug ASP.NET Apps
  28. Blog Post of the Year?
  29. Multiline String Literals in C#
  30. RESTful Wankery
  31. Living in the Future
  32. NBL is JavaScript 2
  33. TwitKu: No Pownce Integration Yet
  34. JonGalloway.Kills.Bunnies
  35. Beautiful Code
  36. BuiltWith.com
  37. LinqToSpaceTime
  38. Out With the Old, In With the Nu
  39. Expert Developers
  40. Brain Food 8-5-2007
  41. Executing a Query in SQL Server Management Studio
  42. Evolutionary Psychology and Open Source
  43. Home Networking in the Mac Universe
  44. Look, Ma! My First Rails App!
  45. Brain Food 6-30-2007
  46. Supporting Open Source .NET Projects
  47. Brain Food 6-24-2007
  48. The List
  49. Steve Yegge's Back!
  50. Brain Food 6-10-2007
  51. Brain Food 6-3-2007
  52. Brain Food 5-26-2007
  53. Moving from .NET to Ruby: The IDE Question
  54. Silverlight != Sugarlight
  55. Dynamic Languages with Silverlight
  56. Finally
  57. Conservation of Complexity
  58. Thoughts on "The Mythical Man-Month"
  59. State of the Blog Address
  60. Contributing to an Open Source Project (Part I)
  61. Aardvark'd
  62. The Real Release Cycle
  63. Embracing the Constraints of Web UI
  64. Software Consulting Companies in Grand Rapids, MI
  65. Shrinkwrap Software Companies in Grand Rapids, MI
  66. Freebase
  67. Yubnub