What blog posts influenced your thinking the most?

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-09-16)

• Simon Willison identifies three highly influential blog posts that shaped his thinking on fundamental software engineering principles and career progression.
• Joel Spolsky’s “The Law of Leaky Abstractions” encouraged him to always seek a deeper understanding of underlying layers, preparing for when abstractions inevitably fail.
• Will Larson’s “Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt” reframes large-scale changes like service or database migrations as a core, investable skill in software engineering, rather than something to avoid.
• Charity Majors’ “The Engineer/Manager Pendulum” provided permission to switch between engineering and management roles, asserting that successful developers often “pendulum” between tracks, enhancing their capabilities in both.