Small Diffs - by Greg Foster

The human-code-context problem

Agentic coding is creating a new problem that's not getting enough attention: human engineers are losing context.

Jun 5 • 

Greg Foster

2

February 2025

Principles for Building Hardworking, Motivated Teams

Some teams consistently accomplish feats that seem almost superhuman—think of rocket companies landing reusable boosters on floating platforms, or…

Feb 7 • 

Greg Foster

3

From Table Layouts to Tailwind: The Evolution of Front-End Styling (1995–2025)

A long history of CSS, Sass, Tailwind, and more

Feb 3 • 

Greg Foster

3

January 2025

‘Spawn Me a PR’ Isn't Ready for Large Codebases: The Context Barrier to AI Code Generation

Practical, production-useful code generation is a famously thorny challenge - yet if you browse X or LinkedIn, you might get the impression that we’re…

Jan 23 • 

Greg Foster

1

Takehomes & Algos are Both Evil - And Other Lessons from 1000+ SWE Interviews

To hire exceptional engineers, prioritize signal clarity in your interviews, match them tightly to your company’s true needs, and leverage blind…

Jan 13 • 

Greg Foster

2

1

What Happened to Lightweight Desktop Apps? History of Electron’s Rise

It had one key killer feature: "embedding Node.js and Chromium to provide a powerful desktop runtime for web technologies." But is that worth a world of…

Jan 9 • 

Greg Foster

6

4

Are you having any fun?

The journey is the whole thing. Great things do take a long time, but fun is what keeps you motivated for the long haul.

Jan 9 • 

Greg Foster

7

The Most Important Part of Engineering Management: Context

BLUF: A good EM's job is, fundamentally, to spend most their time building broad context so that they can tactfully reshare it out in the right way at…

Jan 7 • 

Greg Foster

The Bryan Johnson Approach to Eng Productivity

I recently watched Netflix’s Bryan Johnson documentary (Netflix Link) and came away both intrigued and amused by his extreme quest to maximize health…

Jan 6 • 

Greg Foster

1

U-hauling Servers on Christmas: Extreme Straight-Line Engineering

BLUF: 10x engineers find the biggest fires, and execute on extreme straight-line solutions, often stepping on toes in the process

Jan 4 • 

Greg Foster

1

Will AI Transform—or Threaten—the Per-Seat SaaS Model?

Charging for software has always been a tricky business, and I’ve watched firsthand how it’s evolved.

Jan 3 • 

Greg Foster

2

December 2024

Should SaaS startups offer on-prem?

I get asked—a lot—to build a self-hosted or on-prem version of Graphite.

Dec 24, 2024 • 

Greg Foster

4