Adam Marcus

Pinhead Gunpowder is on their first tour in 35 years of being a band. This is them in NYC last week. Highly recommend if they are anywhere near your city. …but I bet them playing West Side Highway was only for New York, sorry!

If you run a paper reading group or a book club related to tech, I'd love to hear from you about your experience doing it. Trying to see what we can all learn from each other forms.gle/yiPzDProm7oY...

Now indexing 215 internships at companies building software infrastructure. All internships are freely and fully searchable as a service to students. Zero reason you should not be sharing with your students, friends, kids. Let's get them hacking. theconsensus.dev/internships....

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

If you write online, consider a "how I write" AI disclosure. Or: How I (don't) use AI to write blog posts: blog.marcua.net/2026/09/27/a...

If you write online, consider a "how I write" AI disclosure. Or: How I (don't) use AI to write blog posts: blog.marcua.net/2026/09/27/a...

This is an interesting post, and worth reading. I particularly like the aspects of code review that he identifies as not easily reduced to agent automatable functions www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/2026/08/24/t...

Yes! “We should be spending some of our productivity gains on things that seem like slowing down: meetings, design reviews, conversations. These ways of maintaining alignment, sharing knowledge, and creating human connections are…more important than ever to creating good outcomes at scale.”

Me First and the Gummie Gummies

I needed code indexing of major systems to help me research software. And now Standard subscribers get access to the same dataset. At the moment around 60 databases and programming languages are indexed (searchable, browsable), and the full 400+ project corpus is the goal.

Microconferences: A modest proposal for alternative systems to generate, evaluate, and share knowledge.

Really nice blog post that struggles with the mentorship vs. production tension academia is facing. It’s the academic analog to the problem of mentoring junior engineers in the age of agents. I like the guidance for students to only use AI for a task once you know how to do that task yourself.

Working on an A.I. policy for my calculus classes. Decided to be upfront about the current situation with LLMs and to give a heartfelt explanation for why the course still matters.

Via @jacobian.org "The Django Software Foundation is hiring an Executive Director! Main responsibilities: fundraising, managing staff and day-to-day operations, and generally helping the DSF mature. We’re looking for candidates with a history of nonprofit leadership....

vibes like this classic www.usenix.org/legacy/event...

In "Authorize, don't authenticate," I argue for the elimination of the login screen in applications that manage your personal data. You should be authorizing apps to access your data, not authenticating for the privilege of handing it over! blog.marcua.net/2026/07/31/a...

In "Authorize, don't authenticate," I argue for the elimination of the login screen in applications that manage your personal data. You should be authorizing apps to access your data, not authenticating for the privilege of handing it over! blog.marcua.net/2026/07/31/a...

Any data engineers in my network or on #databs looking for a short-term contract setting up a Databricks-based ingestion/analysis pipeline? Would be for an academic lab studying the platform economy in collaboration w/ NYC gov. Happy to connect you!

end of an era. the lesson one should not take from this is that human annotation/labeling is over, but the players have changed. scale, surge, companies that work at larger scale, have taken over.

I'm starting virtual office hours for anyone who is a new/soon-to-be professional in software engineering/product management/design. I'm excited to learn from and give my opinion on questions and experiences participants have in these interesting times for our field. blog.marcua.net/2026/06/25/o...

Dear New York: Today is the day to work through the uncertainty and make some compromises. Go vote!

20 full coaching scholarships for leaders from underrepresented groups in technology

Really nice framing from @skamille.themanagerswrath.com : When using AI tools for communication, respect for your collaborators is the thing to optimize for.

Abstracts due today for Papers and Talks at ACM Collective Intelligence and HCOMP 2026. Hope you'll submit!

Whatever your transactional database is, help me understand your use of it. This survey is run by @theconsensusdev, independent of any database or vendor. Repost or pass along to industry peers for broader representation forms.gle/fqjQsezWsztx...

For designers to work outside a codebase, you have to keep wireframes and implementation in sync. To that end, I'm sharing Figmimic, a bookmarklet that copies any website or webapp into Figma in an editable state. Try it: marcua.net/minitools/fi... Blog post: blog.marcua.net/2026/05/05/f...

Donate $30 to an educational non-profit or open-source project and I'll credit you $30 toward The Consensus Standard subscription. I'm excited to support these organizations with you! theconsensus.dev/subscribe.html

The team of JupyterCon 2023, PyData Paris 2024 & 2025 organizes a new conference named Compute! Paris 2026 on open source computation and data. The event will take place on November 25–26, 2026 at Sorbonne Université in Paris. CfP deadline: May 24, 2026: compute.events/paris2026/cf...

I've been working on this over the last few months and in my opinion it is just beyond cool. Grammar of graphics for SQL users!

Late last year, I gave a talk at Northeastern to students in a few software engineering classes about what's changing and what's staying the same for junior engineers in industry with the introduction of coding agents. Slides and notes here: blog.marcua.net/2026/04/08/a....

I made a tiny tool for quickly sharing small datasets (< ~1000 rows) without uploading any data to a server. 🔗 ziptbl.com It compresses the data into the link itself, so there’s no account, hosting, or storage layer involved. Here's Florence Nightingale's famous 📊 data: ziptbl.com#d=eNpdlE-LGz...

Are you a researcher in CS or a CS-adjacent field curious about how an AI agent can help you with your research project? Want to try a new tool for your research support in a paid user study ($100, 2 hr)? Limited spot numbers. See details and sign up here: forms.gle/JzLtkAhe7Ttv...

I've never built anything for a decade professionally, but here we are! blog.marcua.net/2026/03/12/b...

"...managers who treat AI as a productivity multiplier for their junior engineers are optimizing for output. The managers who use AI to push their juniors into harder problems are optimizing for growth. These look similar on a quarterly roadmap. They produce very different engineers over two years."

I want to talk about why AI-based mass surveillance is so dangerous, and why I would oppose it no matter which party or president is in office.

chardet was vipeforked to MIT and I have thoughts about it. Spoiler: I like it. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/3/5/the...

If you find yourself in Las Vegas, The Punk Rock Museum is a pretty good place to go! It's like 50% nostalgia for whatever 1-2 decades of punk you liked, 50% stuff Fat Mike / NOFX liked or collected.

Just posted "Four questions agents can't answer: Software engineering after agents write the code" We're dedicating a lot of brain space to what coding agents can do, but it's equally important to consider what they won't accomplish for years to come. blog.marcua.net/2026/02/25/f...

Only a few more days (full consideration deadline: March 1) to apply to our lecturer position at @cornelltech.bsky.social!

CBGB&OMFUG. Iconic and mourned. www.theguardian.com/music/2026/f...

Just posted "Four questions agents can't answer: Software engineering after agents write the code" We're dedicating a lot of brain space to what coding agents can do, but it's equally important to consider what they won't accomplish for years to come. blog.marcua.net/2026/02/25/f...

[new blog post] End of Productivity Theater muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/end-...

🦆 ↔️ 🦀 DuckDB Labs is looking for a Rust engineer to join our team in Amsterdam. 📝 See the details and application page at duckdblabs.com/jobs/rust_en...