David Rupp

On sabbatical. My opinions are mine. MINE, I say! Future employers (if any) can get their own damn opinions.

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

Never forget.

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@hwinkler4real Did he, though? https://t.co/2JjDj7lYv2

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@GaryMarcus @Jason I'm not a fan of the prevailing frenzied boosterism of AI. But an equal-but-opposite reaction is simply the same frenzy with a different polarity. There is some value to be gained from the tech. Hard polarisation of discourse does not help.

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

"You can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine." -- I want this on a t-shirt, stat!

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.

The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@vincentdonofrio Some positivity to balance: Born Again season two is easily the best thing on TV. It's the best thing Marvel has done since Infinity War and Endgame. There are no weak links in the ensemble, but you and Charlie carry the emotional weight admirably. Braviss'!

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@SandyofCthulhu 3/ ‘The North Wind blows, but we shall outfly it,’ said Gwaihir. And he lifted up Gandalf and sped away south, and with him went Landroval, and Meneldor young and swift.

Tolkien, J. R. R.. The Lord of the Rings (p. 1170). (Function). Kindle Edition.

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@SandyofCthulhu 2/ ‘I would bear you,’ answered Gwaihir, ‘whither you will, even were you made of stone.’ ‘Then come, and let your brother go with us, and some other of your folk who is most swift! For we have need of speed greater than any wind, outmatching the wings of the Nazgûl.’

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@theficouple Of course. What's the fund that's paying 16%?

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@texasrunnerDFW This is obvious only in hindsight, and could easily have gone a different way. Younger you traded the gamble on the upside of the stock for the surety of the thing you valued more at the time. I would be wealthier if I hadn't paid off my house seven years ago, and I don't care.

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@texasrunnerDFW This is reasonable if you assume that past performance guarantees future results. So why is it that the SEC requires a disclaimer to the contrary for mutual funds?
Signed, A Happy Home (Not Mortgage) Owner.

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@scottdwitt @allenholub @Cerylinae0 @work_matters @mattbeane Here's the list of lectures from the Fall 2025 offering of UF's enterprise software engineering special topics course. One lecture each. What do you think?

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@MerriamWebster Ooh, do “could/should/would of” next!

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@allenholub @scottdwitt @Cerylinae0 @work_matters We do need CS degrees. I have both a BS and an MS in CS, and I believe they -- especially the MS -- have made me a better software engineer. I agree that we should not conflate or confuse the disciplines to the extent that the industry currently does.

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@allenholub @scottdwitt @Cerylinae0 @work_matters Maybe instead of uni XOR trade school, we should be thinking along the lines of med school or law school or the other professional advanced degrees. Four years of undergrad followed by training and specialization in real-world technique.

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@allenholub @scottdwitt @Cerylinae0 @work_matters What if I practice all this stuff in Java, and my first job uses Python? Or vice versa? What if I learn Scrum™®©$ and it's mobbing at work? Or vice versa? What if I learn Gitflow and it's some hodgepodge nightmare branching strategy? Or not even git?

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@scottdwitt @Cerylinae0 @allenholub @work_matters I'm on a committee at the University of Florida, and we continually discuss this. I think topics like testing, deployment, logging, etc., are trade school territory. My preference: Make the experience available, but via clubs, open source, internships, etc.; not curriculum.

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@housecor Sprints in XP were not boundaries to complete work. They were somewhat arbitrary, but as an agreed checkpoint for reflection, far enough out that some progress would likely be made, but soon enough to be able to adjust and correct course if feedback so indicated.

[David Rupp @davidrupp27]

@garrettshanley @UF Well done. You are a credit to your profession. Keep up the good work!