Many of today’s programmers—excuse me, software engineers—consider themselves “creatives.” Artists of a sort. They are given to ostentatious personal websites with cleverly hidden Easter eggs and parallax scrolling; they confer upon themselves multihyphenate job titles (“ex-Amazon-engineer-investor-author”) and crowd their laptops with identity-signaling vinyl stickers. Some regard themselves as literary sophisticates. …

In my first job out of college, I was assigned the task of rewriting the autocomplete feature of a search page. The original code, entombed in a decrepit codebase, was a nauseating monstrosity that others wanted no truck with. The plan was to rewrite it in TypeScript—a dialect of JavaScript—drawing …

Lex Fridman has done many long interviews on his popular podcast. Even so, the episode with the legendary programmer John Carmack has an unhinged director’s-cut feel to it. Over five hours, Carmack dishes on everything from vector operations to Doom. But it’s something Fridman says, offhand, that really justifies the …

While recently reading about leg-lengthening surgery, I couldn’t help but sense a touch of absurdity in the whole enterprise. Although I’m no taller than average—I’m 5'9", thank you very much—dispensing sincere sympathy for the men featured in the article didn’t come naturally. Even when it did, my sympathy was mixed …