Phil Calçado
@philcalcado.com
Headed engineering for companies w/ either millions of users but no revenue or millions in revenue but no users.
If people are this upset about Little Italy(!!), I can't wait to see how these bots go when the new version of the map shows Carroll Gardens as a French enclave
I mean, you don't have to tell me that the Anthropic 's Claude Code team doesn't review their AI-written code--it's pretty obvious. Just this week they broke--again--the copy and paste inside the IntelliJ terminal.
the existence of forward-deployed engineers implies the rest of us are backward-deployed engineers
hot take: Slack is ok for chat and terrible as an email replacement the fragmentation creates more "quick meetings" because eventually the only way to know wtf is going on across channels, threads, and DMs is to summon everyone into a call and no, AI won't solve this
Anthropic’s whole vibe went from ethos to mythos pretty quick huh
Having AI do the research and write your tech spec is like keeping a pristine, never-even-opened copy of The Power Broker on your living room bookshelf.
TTRPG studios and professionals are already under so much hardship, it's incredibly sad what is happening to @paizo.com paizo.com/blog/paizo-r...
my favorite part of tech keynotes is the AI demo just sitting there like okay what are the SF gang doing today are we planning a trip are we planning a party are we choosing a restaurant are we breaking up with bae where we going AI fam
I’ve been in this industry for twenty-five years and have seen all sorts of companies and projects. You know what I have never heard? Someone saying, “You know what I really like about working here? Cross-team collaboration.” philcalcado.com/2026/06/01/c...
Cross-Team Pragmatics
philcalcado.com
It's disheartening to watch so many companies that were building genuinely useful infrastructure and platform primitives for AI products pivot to AI coding agents.
* “I slopped it and here’s what I got” means: Take it or leave it. * “I did some research and here’s what I think” means: I researched, formed a view, and used whatever tools helped me get there. Maybe one of those tools was AI. Maybe it wasn’t. From philcalcado.com/2026/05/31/n...
Nutrition Labels for AI
philcalcado.com
AWS making S3 strongly consistent in 2020 quietly killed a lot of distributed systems sacred cows. A whole class of designs that used to require databases, queues, or coordination products suddenly became "just a bunch of files in S3." www.opendata.dev/blog/ingesti...
Ingesting 1Gbps of logs into ClickHouse for $180/month | OpenData
New pipelined producer and consumer clients for OpenData Buffer, plus a ClickHouse integration with batch deduplication, move 1.1 Gbps of logs from an OTel Gateway to ClickHouse via S3 for $180/mo.
opendata.dev
What journalists miss about tokenmaxxing: engineers at big companies have spent their whole careers gaming made-up metrics that map directly to comp. Measuring token usage isnt even close to the silliest thing they’ve been assessed against, and given how easy it is to game, it looked like free money
So much of so-called AI software engineering is writing docs nobody reads and reading docs nobody wrote
Fellow immigrants and expats: when you need to count something quickly, do you use your native language or your adopted country’s language? I’ve lived abroad for twenty years, and I still immediately switch to Portuguese when I count cash.
It's still hard to predict how dev tools will adapt to AI development, but one thing that's already pretty clear is that JetBrains and other tool vendors need to beef up their support for Git worktrees and other ways to coordinate multiple streams of work over the same repository.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was rebranding consultants and sales engineers as FDEs.
> The juniors who should be learning right now are either not being hired or developing what a DoD-funded workforce study calls “AI-mediated competence.” They can prompt an AI. They can’t tell you what the AI got wrong. techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-f...
The West Forgot How to Build. Now It's Forgetting Code
The defense industry lost the ability to make weapons when crisis hit. The same pattern is eroding software engineering skills. The timelines are identical.
techtrenches.dev
Since 2023, I’ve been bothering anyone who would listen with the same idea: AI will only really deliver on its promises once it’s in the hands of builders, not fundraisers or course sellers It’s still early, and things could shift, but Mario Zechner’s Pi feels like validation of that idea. 🧵
I appreciate what @surf.social is doing and will keep using the app, but I am disappointed that the @flipboard.com team who built a mind-blowing app in 2010 wasn't able to build a better UX here. It's not just about being slow, it's that it's a lot of clicking around to find content--there's no flow
This generation’s Y2K starts when subsidies end and everyone tries to save on tokens.
Spent the morning sending random people links to the this--such a great episode. Great job @davidpierce.xyz
Vocoder: Magic mic
open.spotify.com
This week's Version History is a blast: it's the story of the vocoder, told with @charlieharding.bsky.social and the guys from Chromeo, and features some awesome tech and more than one impromptu concert 🎧:www.theverge.com/podcast/8986... 📺:www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHCM...
Sad to see Clockwise sent off to a Salesforce farm upstate. It saved my ass running large engineering orgs. Ended up rolling it out across DigitalOcean and SeatGeek, and we somehow even became featured customers in their farewell post… which, in hindsight, might explain things. www.getclockwise.com
The Clockwise team is joining Salesforce
A new chapter for our team, and an important update for our customers.
getclockwise.com