2026 Is The Year Of Serious AI Engineering

  • AI won’t replace engineers until AGI, and AGI changes everything anyway.
  • AI makes the easy parts easier and the hard parts harder — lean into the first, avoid the second.
  • Think of it as the next step from assembly to C to Python: now we program in English.
  • The real bottleneck was always human willpower, not the computer — AI eases that bottleneck.
  • Configure your agents.md, plan ahead, and experiment with what you thought was impossible.
10 February 2026 · 9 min · Stefano Chiodino

Advice to new software engineers

  • Always negotiate your salary — ask for more money at every opportunity.
  • Ask “why” before jumping into solutions; understand the problem, not just the task.
  • Impostor syndrome is normal and never fully goes away.
  • Invest heavily in communication, honesty, and people skills.
  • Protect your work-life balance and polish career leverage points like your CV and interview skills.
12 February 2022 · 6 min · Stefano Chiodino

What you should know about reviewing code

  • Review your own code thoroughly before submitting it for review.
  • Be polite in reviews — frame feedback as suggestions, not criticisms.
  • Code reviews are not the place for style debates; those belong in team-level discussions.
  • Tailor your review intensity to the author’s track record.
  • Perfect is the enemy of good — focus on what matters.
23 October 2021 · 4 min · Stefano Chiodino

Change all Github email addresses

  • Recruiters can discover your email from GitHub commit history.
  • You can batch-clone all your public repos using the GitHub API.
  • Use git filter-branch to rewrite committer and author emails across all repos, then force push.
  • Always back up your repos before rewriting history.
19 January 2021 · 2 min · Stefano Chiodino

Acronyms

  • Overuse of acronyms increases cognitive load and hurts understanding.
  • In code, you would name a variable pageTitle not pt — the same principle applies to communication.
  • Use acronyms only when your full audience knows them.
  • Write for your audience: maximise understanding, not brevity.
23 December 2020 · 2 min · Stefano Chiodino

The Pragmatic Programmer - Notes

  • Programming is a craft; pragmatic programmers are inquisitive, realistic, and adaptable.
  • Core principles include DRY, orthogonality, reversibility, and designing by contract.
  • Invest regularly in your knowledge portfolio: learn new languages, read technical books.
  • Test early, test often, test automatically — and refactor without hesitation when needed.
  • Communicate effectively and always take pride in your work.
15 May 2018 · 25 min · Stefano Chiodino

Welcome to the Internet: You Don't Know Shit, Part 1

  • An empty CSS background-image: url('') causes the browser to make an extra HTTP request to the current page URL.
  • This triggered a mysterious duplicate request that was difficult to debug.
  • The fix is to conditionally omit the style attribute entirely when no image URL is available.
  • The bug was found only by old-school elimination debugging.
25 November 2016 · 2 min · Stefano Chiodino

Forestry.io

  • Forestry.io is an online editor for Hugo sites, an improvement over scribe.io.
  • The preview feature doesn’t support all Hugo shortcodes.
  • It lacks spell checking, mobile responsiveness, and the ability to move files between folders.
  • It feels designed primarily for Jekyll with Hugo support as secondary.
9 October 2016 · 2 min · Stefano Chiodino

Delete all google stored passwords

  • Google Passwords has no built-in bulk delete feature.
  • A short JavaScript snippet run in the browser console can click all delete buttons at once.
27 July 2016 · 1 min · Stefano Chiodino

Hugo: write, deploy, host

  • Hugo with IntelliJ IDEA for writing and Hugo’s live reload server for previewing.
  • Deployment is automated via a bash script triggered by git push or GitHub webhooks.
  • The site is hosted on a DigitalOcean server with nginx, PageSpeed module, and brotli compression.
  • This setup achieved a 100/100 Google PageSpeed score on both mobile and desktop.
21 May 2016 · 6 min · Stefano Chiodino