What blog posts influenced your thinking the most?
- ID
- 24339
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 15 Sep 2026, 4:21 AM
- Fetched
- 15 Sep 2026, 4:44 AM
- Provider
- Simon Willison
- Category
- developer-ai
- Original URL
- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/14/influences/
- Source URL
- https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/
Summary
- Score
- 3.5
- Created
- 15 Sep 2026, 4:45 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
Simon Willison names three blog posts that shaped his career: Joel Spolsky's 'The Law of Leaky Abstractions' (pushing him to understand layers beneath his work), Will Larson's 2018 'Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt' (reframing migrations as a core engineering skill to invest in, not avoid), and Charity Majors' 'The Engineer/Manager Pendulum' (which gave him permission to move back from management to an IC role without career damage).
Why it matters
No actionable change is required from this post; it is a personal reflection. The only concrete takeaway is Larson's argument that you should deliberately practice migrations (service replacement, database engine switches) as a repeatable skill rather than treating each one as a special one-off — worth applying to how you plan your next infrastructure swap.
Discussion angle
Ask the room which single blog post most changed how they ship code or make career moves, and whether they treat migrations as a practiced skill or a dreaded exception.