Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love . It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well. Just jogging your memory; I reached out to you (and John Carmack) about how difficult interviewing had become despite me being a st

About a year ago, I was offered a presentation slot at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin. I rarely take speaking engagements, especially international ones, but this one arrived at just the right time, the right place, and with the right person – I said yes, on the contingency that Ben Dumke-von der Ehe joins me in the presentation. Ben is an early community hire at Stack Overflow who l

About 3 weeks ago, Leo Laporte and I recorded the first episode of what will be a new monthly show on the TWiT network . Naming things is hard, and we almost voted on the name, like we did for Stack Overflow , but we quickly landed on Off By One with Jeff Atwood – which is funny for so many reasons, but mainly because of this programmer joke: No, I did not come up with this variation on the classi

It's been one of those months, and by that, I mean one of the 663 months since I was born. This won't be a long post, because I only have two things to say. First, I'm really glad we re-ordered the GMI (Guaranteed Minimum Income) rural study counties so Mercer County, WV, my Dad's county, went first in October 2025. I knew dad was close to the end, and sure enough, that was the last time I ever sa

It's been a year since I invited Americans to join us in a pledge to Share the American Dream : 1. Support organizations you feel are effectively helping those most in need across America right now . 2. Within the next five years, also contribute public dedications of time or funds towards longer term efforts to keep the American Dream fair and attainable for all our children. Stay gold, America.

The following is drawn from a speech I delivered today at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York City, where I joined Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman to discuss the future of the American Dream : What is the American Dream? In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, James Truslow Adams first defined the American Dream as “[...] a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller f

A few months ago I wrote about what it means to stay gold — to hold on to the best parts of ourselves, our communities, and the American Dream itself. But staying gold isn’t passive. It takes work. It takes action. It takes hard conversations that ask us to confront where we’ve been, where we are, and who we want to be. That’s why I’m incredibly honored to be joining Alexander Vindman in giving a

We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I’m concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream : The costs of housing, healthcare, and education have soared far beyond the pace of inflation and wage growth . We are a democracy, but 144 million Americans – 42% of the adults who live here – do not vote and have no say in what happens. Wealth concentration has reached historic levels

With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven’t any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now? ( Arrival is a fantastic movie. Watch it , but don’t stop there – read the Story of Your Life novella it was based on for so much additional nuance.) This is called the Fermi paradox : The Fermi Paradox is a contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existenc

If you haven’t been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don’t blame you. There’s a lot going on right now. It’s a busy time. But let’s pause and take a moment to celebrate that Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. I can’t possibly say it better than Paul Ford , so I’ll just refer you there: Every five or six minutes, someone in the social sciences publishes a PDF with a ti

It’s my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice: By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities. I am betting against , and John is betting for . By “completely autonomous,” per the SAE level 5 definiti

In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career . With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command line. From here, if you were lucky, you might have a cassette tape drive. If you knew the right commands, you could type them in to l

Hard to believe that I’ve had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that’s yet another sign that the PC is over , because PC upgrades have gotten really boring . It took 5 years for me to muster up the initiative to get my system fully upgraded! 🥱 I’ve been slogging away at this for quite some time now. My PC build blog entry series spans 13 glorious years:

In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing , battery costs must be decreasing, because it’s not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much, right? On an electric scooter , though, the effect of battery price has to be even more dramatic because scooters are such lightweigh

I’ve never thought of myself as a “car person.” The last new car I bought (and in fact, now that I think about it, the first new car I ever bought) was the quirky 1998 Ford Contour SVT . Since then, we bought a VW station wagon in 2011 and a Honda minivan in 2012 for family transportation duties. That’s it. Not exactly the stuff The Stig’s dreams are made of. The station wagon made sense for a fam