The top things I found this week 🏆
Week 3 / 2025
Hey there! Welcome to a new edition of Hybrid Hacker! 🌟
Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.
100% signal, 0% slop.
I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇
🥇 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google
9 min • by Addy Osmani
This is really a great article with a lot of non-trivial and counterintuitive lessons. It’s also well written and everything is explained in a crisp and memorable way.
🥈 The Unbearable Joy of Sitting Alone in a Cafe
5 min • by Candost Dagdeviren
A reflection on the power of disconnection and solitude. I find myself more and more drawn to these kinds of experiences (and articles). I’ll probably try to do the same myself — going to a café without a phone!
🥉 Forest and Desert
2 min • by Kent Beck & Beth Andres-Beck
This is not a new article, but I read it again last week to use it in a presentation. It’s a really great analogy that explores a problem that rarely gets discussed: different teams live different realities, so there is a lot (good) advice that not only doesn’t work for some — it becomes harmful.
The last two articles I include are interesting because they present opposite theses. 👇
4) LLMs Are Not Fun
2 min • by Ori Bernstein
Ori explains how LLMs sucked the fun out of his job, because they took away 1) the joy of solving programming problems, and 2) the joy of management and coaching people, as you now spend more time “managing” LLMs than managing humans.
I see where Ori is coming from, but I think his feelings are based on a fallacy re: what his job is about. I wrote kind of a response to this piece in the latest Refactoring article:
5) Web Development Is Fun Again
3 min • by Mattias Geniar
This is literally the opposite article than the one above. Mattias found renewed joy in programming with LLMs because they made it easier to make ideas come true, stripping away a lot of the stupid complexity brought in by the modern web.
And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!
You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬
See you next week!
Sincerely 👋
Luca
@Addy Osmani’s lessons are gold, counterintuitive but highly practical.