Paper Jams
Paper Jam #22 finishes the book club we started last month. In session #21 we discussed the first four chapters of The Psychology of Software Teams by Cat Hicks. Now we take on the remaining three, which move from the individual and the team to the organization around them. These
Paper Jams
Paper Jam #21 will be our first without an actual paper! We're temporarily transforming the format into a book club. On our last call, we noticed we're all planning to read The Psychology of Software Teams by Cat Hicks, published this July. A single session is
What happens when a company simply orders its engineers to ship twice as much? We'll find out in the upcoming Paper Jam #20. In the paper we'll be discussing, a mid-sized, AI-forward company committed to doubling merged pull requests per engineer from mid-2025
I love working on meaningful things with others. It's how I feel connected with the rest of humanity. And it's when looking beyond my immediate community or organization that I tend to find the most surprising or interesting connections. When I was still in academia, it
Software developers use computers not only for writing programs â they also use them to communicate and collaborate with one another. Software development is very much a social activity: collaboration and communication activities can have a powerful impact on the success of software projects. Computer-support for these activities is not
When you build software, sooner or later you will want to think about human behavior â most notably about what motivates humans. I donât mean Skinner boxes, points and ladders, variable reward schedules and the like as you might find them in âfree to play but we have an in-
If you build software products, chances are that youâve worried about adoption before. Will anyone use what Iâve built? How can I get more people to use it? And why do people leave after a few days? Many people have written about this problem, and there are indeed
Developers use many, many tools to collaborate. Those tools solve problems, but also create new challenges: distractions impede productivity, developers struggle to keep up with everything, or partially adopted tools â those are just a few examples. But how can we tackle those problems? In this post, I share six recommendations
Software developers use many tools to support their work. They coordinate with their teams on code hosting sites, interface with non-developers in project management apps, use microblogs to network, and learn through Q&A sites and podcasts. They do derive value from those tools â but what problems and
On the Experience of Making Software.
Starting is free now, so I start everything and finish nothing. On the compulsion loop of agentic coding â and why stopping and resuming are _the_ skills to play with now.
We'll be meeting for Paper Jam #19 on Friday, July 17 at 1pm UTC. We'll be discussing: Charles I. Jones AI and Our Economic Future (2026) [link] This one is a departure proposed by a member of Paper Jams. Our papers so far have come from
We'll be meeting for Paper Jam #16 on Friday, April 24. This time we'll discuss the following paper: Courtney Miller, Rudrajit Choudhuri, Mara Ulloa, Sankeerti Haniyur, Robert DeLine, Margaret-Anne Storey, Emerson Murphy-Hill, Christian Bird, Jenna L. Butler "Maybe We Need Some More Examples:
Wasn't AI supposed to make software development easier? Yes: with the right guardrails and practices, routine programming tasks can now be handed off to an LLM. And no: something else is happening at the same time. I've heard from a few developers now that the work
We'll be meeting for Paper Jam #15 on Friday, March 27 at 2pm UTC. This month we're looking at the following paper: Judy Hanwen Shen, Alex Tamkin How AI Impacts Skill Formation (2026) [link] This paper reports on a between-subjects randomized experiment that investigates how
Do large language models trained on human data respond to the same psychological levers that sway us? Once a month, I meet with subscribers to my site's Paper Jam plan to discuss a paper about The Experience of Making Software. This post reports on Paper Jam #10. Thank
What factors make developers working in teams thrive? Context: once a month, I meet with subscribers to the Paper Jam plan of my blog to discuss a paper at the intersection of topics such as computer-supported collaborative work, software engineering, human-computer interaction, and psychology. This post reports on
How do identity, content, and interaction transparency affect online interactions and collaboration? Context: once a month, I meet with subscribers to the Paper Jam plan of my blog to discuss a paper at the intersection of topics such as computer-supported collaborative work, software engineering, human-computer interaction, and psychology.
I love working on meaningful things with others. It's how I feel connected with the rest of humanity. And it's when looking beyond my immediate community or organization that I tend to find the most surprising or interesting connections. When I was still in academia, it
Software developers use computers not only for writing programs â they also use them to communicate and collaborate with one another. Software development is very much a social activity: collaboration and communication activities can have a powerful impact on the success of software projects. Computer-support for these activities is not
When you build software, sooner or later you will want to think about human behavior â most notably about what motivates humans. I donât mean Skinner boxes, points and ladders, variable reward schedules and the like as you might find them in âfree to play but we have an in-
If you build software products, chances are that youâve worried about adoption before. Will anyone use what Iâve built? How can I get more people to use it? And why do people leave after a few days? Many people have written about this problem, and there are indeed
