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Nyssa Turner reposted thisNyssa Turner reposted this"Coding is solved. But engineering is not." Sherry Jiang nailed something I see on every client mission. Writing code has become the cheap part. What hasn't changed: deciding what to build, drawing the right boundaries, figuring out what happens when a third-party API times out at 2am, and making sure someone can still maintain the thing six months from now. The teams struggling with AI aren't the ones writing bad prompts. They're the ones who never had engineering discipline in the first place — and who are now shipping bad decisions much faster than before. AI removed the typing. It didn't remove the responsibility.
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Nyssa Turner shared thisStay Human. Lately there’s been a lot of conversation about “AI slop.” As a software engineer, I use AI every single day. Sometimes it helps me untangle a complex architecture problem. Sometimes it helps me organize my thoughts. Sometimes it helps me write something like this. The ideas are still mine. The words are just a little clearer. But AI has made me think about something else entirely. I have a poster in my office that says, “Work hard and be nice to people.” It sounds almost too simple to be worth hanging on a wall but I think about it almost every day. I’ve always tried to approach work with a smile, curiosity, and a willingness to help. When someone reaches out, I don’t always know the answer, but I usually know someone who might. So I make the introduction. I point them in the right direction. I stay with the problem until it lands somewhere useful. Lately, though, I’ve noticed something changing. When I ask for help, I often receive a link to documentation. A chat thread. Or the increasingly familiar, “I don’t know. That’s not my team.” None of those responses are wrong but they’re not the same as someone taking ownership of helping another person. The difference isn’t technical. It’s human. Over the past few months I’ve been studying history outside of software. One idea keeps resurfacing: civilizations didn’t flourish because individuals knew everything. They flourished because people shared knowledge, created together, and helped each other solve problems. Technology amplified that, which is amazing. That’s why I don’t worry about AI replacing engineers. I worry about us slowly replacing human interaction with efficient interaction. Efficiency is valuable but connection is irreplaceable. This isn’t an anti-AI post. I’ll probably use AI tomorrow morning before my first cup of coffee. But I hope we don’t let convenience become an excuse to stop showing up for each other. If AI gives us back time, let’s spend some of that time being more human. Not less. So I don’t have a grand conclusion. Just a small request. Stay curious. Stay kind. And while you’re at it… Stay human.
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Nyssa Turner posted thisOne of the best leadership lessons I’ve learned had nothing to do with technology, architecture, or project management. It was about reducing noise. I had a leader who was intentional about protecting people’s attention. We avoided unnecessary “@all” messages, questioned whether automated emails were actually providing value, and thought carefully before interrupting everyone’s day. At first, it seemed like a small thing. Over time, I realized it was one of the most respectful things you can do for a team. Attention is a finite resource. Every notification, broadcast message, and automated email asks someone to stop what they’re doing and decide whether it matters. When everything is treated as urgent, nothing feels urgent. Eventually people start filtering it all out, and that’s when genuinely important communication gets missed. Reducing noise isn’t about communicating less. It’s about communicating with intention. Before sending that organization-wide message or creating another automated notification, it’s worth asking: * Does everyone actually need this? * Could this reach a smaller audience? * Will this help people do their jobs better, or is it just adding another notification they’ll learn to ignore? Clear, thoughtful communication builds trust. And when something truly needs immediate attention, people notice because you’ve respected their attention the rest of the time. Sometimes the most effective communication strategy isn’t saying more. It’s creating enough quiet that the important things can actually be heard.
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Nyssa Turner shared thisOne thing about me, for better or worse, if someone can’t find an answer, I will find it. This year has brought on many challenges for me in an area I had never struggled in before: my health. Starting in February, I started having a hot, stabbing pain in my upper abdomen area. I’ve had several MRCPs, CT scans, blood work tests, ERCPs, my gallbladder removed, an endoscopy, and multiple 2am ER visits from the unbelievable pain. I’ve sat in the dark in the time of day when no one was awake and contemplated if the pain would go away on its own or if I had to go back to the ER only for them to make the pain go away and give me no answers. I’ve sat in multiple doctors offices including my PCP and GI only for them to be stumped by what’s wrong with me. So, I bought a bunch of anatomy and physiology books to find my answer. If nothing else, just to learn to speak more clearly about what’s wrong with me. For now, all I can say is I have epigastric pain that does not have a specific trigger. I hope we as people never forget that we have the power to find our answers too. Cheers, friends.
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Nyssa Turner posted thisI had kind of a funny realization today. I’ve been using ChatGPT a lot lately for work, but the thing that’s made me the most excited has nothing to do with software engineering. I realized I miss school. Not tests. Not grades. Not writing papers at 2 a.m. I miss learning. Lately I’ve been doing Duolingo every day, and I realized what I was enjoying wasn’t just learning Spanish. It was having something to study. Having structure. Feeling like I was making progress. So today I did something that probably sounds a little nerdy. I asked ChatGPT to help me build a four-year college curriculum. Not for programming. For history, economics, government, science, philosophy, geography, psychology, and all the subjects I wish I knew better as an adult. I don’t want to memorize facts. I want to understand why things happen. Why civilizations rise and fall. How economies actually work. Why countries make the decisions they do. How to think more critically about what’s happening in the world instead of just reacting to headlines. Now I’m ordering an atlas, buying books, putting together a binder, and we’re literally designing syllabi, quizzes, projects, and coursework together. It’s honestly the most excited I’ve been to learn in years. I’ve seen a lot of discussion about whether ChatGPT is replacing learning. For me, it’s been the exact opposite. It’s made me want to become a student again. I’m curious if anyone else has used ChatGPT in a way that surprised them.
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Nyssa Turner reposted thisNyssa Turner reposted thisOne of the most underrated things in tech is having someone on your team who is genuinely hungry to learn, build, and improve every single day. Lately, I’ve had the chance to work closely with Prayag Patel and I’ve been incredibly impressed by his consistency, curiosity, and willingness to keep pushing even when the grind gets repetitive and exhausting. A lot of people love the idea of building products. Fewer people love the process: - debugging the same issue for hours - reworking designs - learning unfamiliar concepts - getting feedback over and over - staying up late trying to make something better than it was yesterday That’s the part that actually matters. What stands out to me most is that he doesn’t approach development like “just tasks.” He cares about understanding why something works, how to improve it, and how to create products people genuinely enjoy using. That mindset is hard to teach. Great engineers aren’t built from knowing everything on day one. They’re built from persistence, humility, curiosity, and the willingness to keep showing up when things get difficult. Excited to see where his career goes from here. The future is bright for developers who stay hungry to learn and passionate about building.
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Nyssa Turner posted thisI think a lot of companies secretly have this problem right now: They want “AI productivity gains” without realizing their engineers are already operating at 110%. So instead of AI removing stress, it just raises expectations. Now people are expected to: - ship faster - support more systems - attend more meetings - document more - respond instantly - AND learn AI tooling on top of it A lot of engineers aren’t resisting AI. They’re resisting being turned into a machine.
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Nyssa Turner posted thisThe best engineers I know are rarely the loudest people in the room. They’re usually the ones quietly asking: “What changed?” Because most production issues are not random. Something changed. A deploy. A feature flag. A dependency. A config. A timeout. A “small harmless update.” Finding the change is usually finding the story.
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Nyssa Turner posted thisOne of the weirdest things about being a strong engineer is that eventually your job stops being “write code” and becomes: - calm people down - translate chaos - debug human decisions - explain risk - find what changed - protect systems from panic - make decisions with incomplete information The coding part honestly becomes the easy part. The hard part is becoming the person everyone looks at when production catches on fire.
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Nyssa Turner liked thisNyssa Turner liked thisI went over the rules twice and didn’t find anything about using AI this year. So instead of stressing over the waiver wire or worrying about my flex spot, I let an agent take over. I call it "leveraging modern tools for optimal weekend outcomes." I’m curious what the rest of the league will call it.
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Nyssa Turner liked thisNyssa Turner liked thisIn the 1980s, NASA ran a study it expected to be routine. Take flight crews at the end of a brutal three-day shift, put them in a simulator, and measure how badly fatigue damages their flying. Twenty crews. Half were exhausted teams, straight off three days of flying together. Half were rested pilots who had never flown with each other. Fresh, capable, interchangeable. In business language: a backfill. The result: The teams won. The exhausted pilots made more mistakes as individuals. Exactly as predicted. But three days together had built something no metric captured: a team that catches itself. A wrong setting spotted before it mattered. A hundred small corrections made for free, without anyone asking. As teams, the tired crews made fewer errors than the rested backfills. The hypothesis failed. The team beat the swap. Now walk that into your world. Every reshuffle. Every headcount-neutral slide that moves names between boxes on the org chart and calls it a saving. The slide counts heads, and the heads are identical before and after. What the slide can't show is the team it dissolves: the pairs who catch each other's mistakes without being asked, built over years, gone in one planning cycle. I've sat in transformation steercos where forty people moved between teams on a single slide, and the move was called neutral because the headcount didn't change. You're held accountable for how your team performs. NASA found what predicts it. Nothing you're given measures it. So measure it yourself. Sixty seconds: 1. Write down the pairs on your team who catch each other's work without being asked. 2. That list is your team. Not the org chart version. The working version. It took months or years to build and it appears in no system you report into. 3. Next time a reshuffle or a swap is called like-for-like, read the list before you agree. Every pair it breaks is a cost nobody counted. One thing NASA never tested: how long a team takes to rebuild once it's broken. Nobody measures that either. Ask anyone who's watched a good team get redistributed. A tired team beats a rested backfill.
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Nyssa Turner liked thisNyssa Turner liked this"Coding is solved. But engineering is not." Sherry Jiang nailed something I see on every client mission. Writing code has become the cheap part. What hasn't changed: deciding what to build, drawing the right boundaries, figuring out what happens when a third-party API times out at 2am, and making sure someone can still maintain the thing six months from now. The teams struggling with AI aren't the ones writing bad prompts. They're the ones who never had engineering discipline in the first place — and who are now shipping bad decisions much faster than before. AI removed the typing. It didn't remove the responsibility.
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Nyssa Turner reacted on thisNyssa Turner reacted on thisWhat happens when curiosity meets a complex problem? Innovation takes shape. Meet Yashika Chaudhary, the WEX Tech Transformation Award winner, recognised for the “Invoicing Re-Platformization” project. Her journey has always been about sharing knowledge beyond her own work, like leading sessions on invoicing and AI tools for developer productivity. Seeing people adopt these tools and create real impact is what makes innovation truly rewarding. For Yashika, the recognition is a motivation to keep learning, keep building, and share that knowledge with the people around her. Her experience reflects something we value deeply at WEX: innovation grows when people have the space to experiment, share knowledge, and turn complex challenges into meaningful solutions. #WEXIndia #LifeAtWEX #MeetTheWEXers #Engineering #TechTransformation #EmployeeSpotlight
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Nyssa Turner liked thisNyssa Turner liked thisThe challenge isn't just hosting a successful event. It's knowing what experience to create, coordinating the details, managing vendors, budgets, reminders, and follow-ups. That is why I'm building Planique, an AI-powered event operations platform and your virtual personal assistant that removes the behind-the-scenes coordination pain. It helps you make decisions, removes the friction from planning, turns your idea into a personalized plan, and executes it with you in control.
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Nyssa Turner liked thisNyssa Turner liked thisAI made everyone faster at producing things nobody verified.
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Nyssa Turner liked thisNyssa Turner liked thisSoftware developers that focus a lot more on the product than the code itself are going to be far more employable over the next 5-10 years.
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Nyssa Turner liked thisNyssa Turner liked thisWeek 1 down at Gate City Bank ! 🎉 After 15 years at WEX, I decided it was time for a change. I’m excited to share that I’ve accepted a new role as Senior Digital Platform Strategist at Gate City Bank. I’m incredibly grateful for the people, experiences, and opportunities that shaped my 15 years at WEX. I’ll always appreciate the journey and the relationships I built along the way. One week in, and I’m already excited about the people I’m meeting, the work ahead, and the opportunity to help create a better way of life for the communities Gate City Bank serves. Here’s to new challenges, new teammates, and a new chapter!
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Andrés Bedoya Garcés
Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of people losing their minds over AI. Suddenly IDEs aren’t enough anymore. Now people need terminals that support 300 windows because they want to run 9 agents just to center a div. Everyone is talking about git worktrees like it’s some brand new discovery (when a few weeks ago almost nobody even knew the feature existed). Others are buying Mac minis to run local models with Ollama or OpenClaw. I’m not saying any of this is useless. Quite the opposite, many of these tools are genuinely impressive. But many years ago I learned something valuable from a talk by Julián Duque at MedellínJS: "in technology, there are no silver bullets". There is no single tool that solves everything. Every problem needs context, judgment, and careful analysis. Personally, I’m still a pretty “old school” dev: VS Code + Copilot, and not much else... I’ve tried Claude Code, OpenCode, and Codex out of curiosity. They’re interesting, but in my day-to-day work I still haven’t found a way to integrate them that meaningfully multiplies my productivity. It’s also worth remembering something many people seem to forget: we’re probably living through the last days of subsidized tokens. This might be the final year of artificially cheap AI usage. I wouldn’t be surprised if by 2027 we start seeing plans jump from $20 to $200–$300. So I keep believing the same thing I did years ago: Learning new tools is useful. But learning the fundamentals will always matter more... Geek the Planet!
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Ahmed Said, PhD, ESB
🐘 "PHP Grew Up. Did You Notice?" PHP in 2024 was a completely different language than the one you're making fun of. I get it. The old jokes write themselves. mysql_query(). Global state everywhere. $_POST['whatever']. I lived through that era too. I have the scars. But here's the thing, while a lot of us moved on and kept dunking on PHP from the sidelines, the language kept shipping. Quietly. Consistently. Every year. PHP 8.0 brought named arguments, match expressions, and union types. PHP 8.1 brought enums, fibers, readonly properties, intersection types. PHP 8.2 brought readonly classes, new random APIs, and a serious cleanup of the deprecation backlog. That's not maintenance. That's a language that's actively evolving. Over the next few weeks I'm going to walk through the features I wish I'd paid attention to sooner. Not with docs-style explanations, just real examples of how they changed the way I actually write code day to day. If you still think PHP is stuck in 2009, stick around. I think you'll be surprised. Feature 1: Readonly Classes You were writing 3 files to do what one keyword now does For years, making a truly immutable object in PHP felt like a punishment. You'd write a class, make all the properties private, write a constructor, write a getter for every single property, add a docblock, hope nobody on the team did something creative with reflection... and then do it again for the next DTO. Every. Single. Time. PHP 8.2 just added readonly class and I genuinely felt a little embarrassed about how much boilerplate I used to write. The readonly modifier on the class means every single property is automatically readonly. No setters. No accidental mutation. No defensive getters. You can still make properties public because nothing can change them after construction anyway. This is the kind of feature that makes your DTOs, value objects, and API response models genuinely pleasant to write. I've refactored probably a dozen classes since this landed. Each one got shorter. None got worse. What pattern do you use for immutable data transfer objects? Still doing the old approach? #PHP #PHP82 #WebDevelopment #CleanCode #PHPGrewUp #BackendDev #BackendDevelopment
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