Jessica Kerr

  1. Who are we Now?

    This is based on my keynote at RubyConf 2026. Video, references There’s a philosopher in Naples, Italy, way back in the 1700s who understood something important to software today. Giambattista Vico lived early in the Enlightenment, when mathematical and experimental thinking were all the rage. René Des…

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  2. Symmathesy and AI with Kent Beck

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  3. Verum Factum and the Creator’s Confidence

    Verum Factum: we only really know what we made. Dang, I know that feeling with software! And I miss it, now that AI is doing the coding. But sometimes I still get it...

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  4. What is it like to be you?

    This is what I want to know when I get to know someone. What is the experience of being alive in your body, in your world? This is the definition of consciousness: there is something it is like to be you. Erik Hoel contrasts this with LLMs, speculating there is nothing it is like to ... Read moreWhat…

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  5. Span or Attribute? in OpenTelemetry custom instrumentation

    Instead of emitting a log, add attributes to the current span. OpenTelemetry makes this easy, and Honeycomb makes it free. This gets you more data correlation.

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  6. Communication is hard, but sometimes I can fix it.

    When coding with an agent gets tricky, use the agent to make it less tricky.

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  7. Adding Correctness Conditions to Code Changes

    Today I looked at the first PR on our new project repo. It added a new run script, but the README didn’t mention it. The proposed change was incomplete, because the documentation was out of sync. Did I comment on the PR? heck no. I want to fix this problem for all PRs, not just ... Read moreAdding Correctness…

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  8. Working with AI: Do Things Right

    Today, a quick example of introducing determinism when an AI struggles. I give it a simple instruction, it screws it up, I tell it to write a program to do things right.

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  9. Working with AI: How does it Know?

    Is the AI going to do what I want?

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  10. Speak So They Can Hear You

    “My manager needs to put an ROI on everything,” an SRE leader told me at KubeCon this week. Yeah, I feel that. We know the value of SRE, smoothing all other work so that production can produce. Putting that into dollars though? It’s hard to count the cut costs of incidents that didn’t happen. Yet ..…

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