The path to promotion is not competence but a learnable set of parasitic "rat" behaviors, and here is the concrete skill-set that produces the climb.

Holding ordinary employees accountable for business-wide results they cannot control is unfair and demotivating.

Claude Code programs better than me but with no taste, so I train it to feel my sense of code beauty through a CLAUDE.md manifesto and custom style checkers.

Between two adjacent lines, indentation may grow by one unit only, but may shrink by any number of units — a rule that resolves most code formatting disputes.

Now that AI codes for cents, contributors are paid for the delivery, not the code—so no mercy for sloppy pull requests anymore.

AI coding agents will make software disposable, like fast fashion replaced tailored clothing, creating demand for more programmers, not fewer.

Single Page Applications, once a solution for slow browsers, are now a performance bottleneck due to multiple HTTP round-trips.

Instead of writing code comments that decay and mislead, let LLMs generate documentation on-demand and fail the build when code is too obscure for them to explain.

JavaScript was an elegant prototype-based class-free language until TypeScript and ES6 classes ruined it.

Sales reps and programmers can either fight external obstacles to earn their pay, or convince you, the founder, to pay for their time regardless of results; make the internal path harder.

By breaking your software into small open-source packages, you make the entire product easier to maintain—and significantly higher in quality.

When your pull request won’t merge, don't fight it—fail fast, split your changes, file bugs, and move on smarter.

Windows turns programmers into mouse operators. macOS, built on Unix, keeps the command line alive—where everything is a file, tools connect through pipelines, and real programmers stay in control.

In big organizations, reds obey bosses while blacks serve customers—and blacks survive only by keeping their distance.

Type annotations are a workaround for compiler limitations, not a feature—a well-designed language should infer all types automatically, forcing programmers to write smaller, cleaner modules.