Just One More Prompt

Starting is free now, so I start everything and finish nothing. On the compulsion loop of agentic coding — and why stopping and resuming are _the_ skills to play with now.

Upcoming Paper Jam: AI and Our Economic Future

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

Upcoming Paper Jam: "Maybe We Need Some More Examples"

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:

Agentic Coding Compresses Cognitive Effort

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

Upcoming Paper Jam: How AI Impacts Skill Formation

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

Using Psychological Research to Influence the Behavior of LLMs

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

Developer Thriving: Four Sociocognitive Factors That Create Resilient Productivity on Software Teams

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

Social Transparency in Networked Information Exchange

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.

Paper Jams! An Experiment

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

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: A Useful Lens For Looking At Developer Tools

Software developers use computers not only for writing programs — 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

Self-determination Theory: Understanding Human Motivation for Fun and Profit

When you build software, sooner or later you will want to think about human behavior — most notably about what motivates humans. I don’t mean Skinner boxes, points and ladders, variable reward schedules and the like as you might find them in “free to play but we have an in-

On the Diffusion of Innovations: How New Ideas Spread

If you build software products, chances are that you’ve worried about adoption before. Will anyone use what I’ve 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

New Habits: Nine Tactics That Worked For Me

Studies have shown that about 30% to 50% of what we do in a day can be called habitual [1]. However, adopting new habits is hard: at least I have always struggled with making things stick. But now I think I’ve found something that works for me. It’s

More Than Just Coding: A Study on Supportive Channels and Activities in Software Development

Software developers use more and more tools in their work. Some are directly aimed at creating software, such as IDEs or editors, but many tools play more supportive roles. They help developers communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with others, find new work, or keep up with new technologies. All these tools

Open Source Collaboration Practices in Commercial Projects

Lots of research in software engineering is using publicly-available data from GitHub nowadays. But do findings from such studies translate to closed-sourced development projects? After all, open source development has established a few practices and social conventions that might not be found in companies. In addition, GitHub lends

From Playing The Piano to Algorithms You Can Trust

A few days ago, my piano teacher recommended a book to me: Play It Again: An Amateur Against The Impossible by Alan Rusbridger [commission earned], formerly editor-in-chief of The Guardian. I devoured it within three days. Rusbridger recounts how over about 18 months, he learned playing Chopin’s

Nudging Novices: Five Persuasive Patterns

Back when I was at the University of Hannover working on my PhD, I was also involved in teaching. One of the most memorable experiences was organizing and managing the “software project” course four years in a row. Every year, multiple teams of five students each went through a waterfall

How Software Developers Use Twitter

Many software developers use Twitter in their work, but how and why exactly do they use it? Why do some developers choose not to use Twitter, and what — if anything — do they use instead? We conducted a qualitative study to investigate these questions in depth. TL;DR: Twitter can help

ICSE 2013: Four Days of San Francisco

From May 22 till May 25, I attended ICSE 2013 — the 35th International Conference on Software Engineering — in San Francisco. Apart from learning about new research and connecting with colleagues, I interviewed local practitioners, hugged the Octocat, and was ON A BOAT. This blog post provides some (non-comprehensive) details

Dissertation Published

On February 11 2013, I defended my PhD thesis with the title “Improving the Adoption of Software Engineering Practices Through Persuasive Interventions”. Thanks a lot to Felienne who live-blogged my defense talk and the questioning by the committee. Due to German regulations, having defended my thesis merely meant that

On Testing Culture in GitHub Projects

Previous research suggests that the publicity on GitHub that is making developers’ actions and interactions more visible might have an effect on how software development practices are communicated and how they diffuse in projects. My colleagues (Raphael Pham, Olga Liskin, Fernando Figueira Filho, Kurt Schneider) and I wondered: which influence

Mutual Assessment in the Social Programmer Ecosystem

Developers use social media sites to communicate, collaborate, connect with each other, and even for competition. These sites and their users create a social programmer ecosystem with dynamics that are the subject of ongoing research. Recently, websites have appeared that create profiles from developers’ content and activities on other sites

Backbone.js and AngularJS at HannoverJS

HannoverJS is a local JavaScript user group that I’ve been attending. We meet once a month in rooms provided by a local school. Founded in August 2011 by Christoph Burgdorf, we now usually have around 10 to 15 attendees and two presentations each month. Presentations are held by those

A Collection of Notable Git Resources

Whenever a student or colleague asks me about getting started with git, I look up a set of resources I found quite enlightening and / or useful and give them a bunch of links, often with a hand-crafted description of each. To repeat myself less often in the future, I’