Steve Smith
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stevesmithtech.bsky.social
Steve Smith
@stevesmithtech.bsky.social
Technology leadership | Books leanpub.com/u/stevesmith | Blog stevesmith.tech | Work equalexperts.com | Conf agileonthebeach.com
"AI has removed the developer bottleneck"

If developers really were your bottleneck, throwing developers at a problem would actually have worked in the past 20 years
February 12, 2026 at 12:15 PM
If it has smart in its name, it didn't need to be smart
Ring is a wildly dangerous company. Always has been. But it has sort of flown under the radar the last couple years as it tried to soften its image. Make no mistake that this is an extremely dangerous surveillance dragnet:

www.404media.co/with-ring-am...
With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet
Ring's 'Search Party' is dystopian surveillance accelerationism.
www.404media.co
February 11, 2026 at 10:03 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
Black Mirror: Robot dogs will hunt you down
Reality: Robots will use your love of dogs to hunt you down
“No matter how Ring and other surveillance tech companies may downplay it, there’s no world in which finding lost dogs is the final end-use for this technology.”
Opinion | Ring is using lost dogs to make the surveillance state adorable
The same technology the Amazon-owned company uses to find lost dogs could easily be turned against their owners.
www.ms.now
February 10, 2026 at 7:37 AM
Reposted by Steve Smith
"TDD slows me down"

Good
February 8, 2026 at 12:39 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
Do you remember when people were saying "I think my phone is listening to me, i'm getting ads for stuff I spoke about" and people said "They arent listening to you, they're just this good at predicting your interests"?

Well, it happens they were doing exactly that.
www.cbsnews.com/news/google-...
Google to pay $68 million over allegations its voice assistant eavesdropped on users
Class-action lawsuit alleged that Google's voice assistant illegally recorded and shared private conversations with advertisers.
www.cbsnews.com
February 1, 2026 at 9:44 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
Why The "10x Engineer" Is A Dangerous Myth | with Charity Majors 📽️ AVAILABLE NOW

Watch: youtu.be/aDCOuZ80lDQ
January 30, 2026 at 10:40 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Stay free
Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio)
YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen
youtu.be
January 28, 2026 at 5:02 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
NEW: Our investigation for @thenerve_news reveals not only that Peter Thiel’s Palantir is completely enmeshed in our critical national infrastructure.

It’s also the ‘cloud support’ for our nuclear weapons system 🤯
1/

www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-t...
January 28, 2026 at 11:32 AM
Reposted by Steve Smith
BREAKING: Now that TikTok is under US-based ownership, the social media app potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data.

My latest for @wired.com:

www.wired.com/story/tiktok...
TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes
According to its new privacy policy, TikTok now collects more data on its users, including their precise location, after majority ownership officially switched to a group based in the US.
www.wired.com
January 23, 2026 at 9:48 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
For those keeping score, Bellingcat, The New York Times Visual Investigation Team, & Washington Post's Visual Forensic team have all published analysis showing the ICE shooter wasn't in the path of Renee Nicole Good’s vehicle when he shot her, contradicting statements by the President & his cronies
January 8, 2026 at 3:35 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
I feel like I haven’t even been properly lied to about the purposes of this war
January 3, 2026 at 9:13 AM
Reposted by Steve Smith
day one in mamdani’s new york
January 1, 2026 at 5:10 PM
Mayor Mamdani 🫶
January 1, 2026 at 10:24 AM
Reposted by Steve Smith
It's been a big year at Signal. Thanks to you, more & more people are speaking privately and freely. Thanks to you, we hit the top of app stores in multiple countries & served as critical global comms infrastructure. It's an honor to build Signal for you, with your support. 🩵
December 30, 2025 at 7:20 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
immigrants score the lowest on tests, but they also take all our jobs, while at the same time taking all the welfare and buying all the homes
Stephen Miller: "If you subtract immigration out of test scores, all of the sudden our test scores skyrocket"
December 9, 2025 at 10:59 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
Trunk-Based Development has a reputation for being fast, fearless, and incredibly effective… but does it actually work in the real world?

In this video, we have a company providing us the details of how they put Trunk-Based Development to the test...

WATCH ➡️ youtu.be/CR3LP2n2dWw
We Tried Trunk-Based Development... The Results Were Shocking.
YouTube video by Modern Software Engineering
youtu.be
December 10, 2025 at 7:02 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
We Tried Trunk-Based Development... The Results Were Shocking | @davefarley77.bsky.social

TOMORROW NIGHT @ 7PM (UK)

Subscribe & hit the notifications bell 🔔 so you never miss an upload! ➡️ youtube.com/@ModernSoftw...
December 9, 2025 at 5:42 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
I am really enjoying having some time between contracts at the moment... I just wrote an article about the test desiderata - this has been on my mind to write about for several years at this point! coding-is-like-cooking.info/2025/12/test...
Test Desiderata 2.0 - Coding Is Like Cooking
Kent Beck is one of the original authors of JUnit, an open source tool that kick-started a huge shift in programmer behaviour that I and others have found immensely valuable. In 2019 he published his ...
coding-is-like-cooking.info
December 8, 2025 at 1:47 PM
It's always a Wordpress plugin
December 1, 2025 at 6:00 PM
@ethicistforhire.bsky.social do you have a canonical online reference for your Newcrafts 2019 argument that "it's just a tool" is insufficient/naive
December 1, 2025 at 12:45 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features."

There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.
November 20, 2025 at 5:32 PM
How can there be a bubble when the tulip farmer is so rich?
November 20, 2025 at 3:26 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
TDD is more important than ever
TDD is more important than ever
Lately, I've been reminded of the heady days of my agile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development) youth by how often I've found myself asking, "how will we test this?" As I've mentioned frequently on podcasts and recent Q&As about AI, an odd paradox has emerged in the software industry: 1. Developers experienced in agile engineering practices like test-driven development tend to be among the most skeptical of AI code generation, often citing fears that software quality is being thrown out the window 2. Developers experienced in agile engineering practices like test-driven development tend to be among the most successful at building great software with coding agents, often citing creative techniques enabling agents to verify the correctness of their work In the late 2000s, I always knew I was talking to a solid programmer if their first question upon being handed a complex task was to ask, "how will we test this?" Agile developers learned back then that literally everything hinged on establishing a fast, reliable, automated way to verify your code fulfilled its intended purpose. Without tests, you can't refactor aggressively, deploy frequently, or delete safely. Over the 2010s, many of us learned patterns and heuristics that allowed us to take shortcuts and tone down our testing zeal in the name of pragmatism and efficiency, but the underlying skill of concocting ways to verify our code never stopped being valuable. Well, here we are again. In 2025, the only thing that matters when it comes to coding agents like Claude Code and Codex CLI is to ensure they are equipped with the tools they need to independently verify the correctness of their work.
justin.searls.co
November 18, 2025 at 10:05 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
controversial take nobody asked for: trying to hold a "middle-ground" position on the usefulness of genAI feels like being satisfied with 'regression to the mean' as acceptable standard 🤷🏾‍♀️
November 3, 2025 at 9:21 PM
Reposted by Steve Smith
When you see Mamdani looking all normal doing normal person things—petting bodega cats, riding public transport—you realize just how bizarre and estranged our average candidate for public office is. Rich martians in flesh suits
November 2, 2025 at 2:26 PM