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Chisomo Chiweza

@chisomochiweza.com

Programmer. Passionate about software engineering and problem solving. Malawian 🇲🇼. Christian ✝️. She/Her. Hobbies include writing ✍️, art 🎨, cooking 🍳 and occasionally gaming 🎮. chisomochiweza.com

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Chisomo Chiweza @chisomochiweza.com · 17m

Reading an old HBR article for work. Some interesting points made even then. hbr.org/2019/03/digi...

Snippet from Harvard Business Review article saying:

Lesson 1: Figure out your business strategy before you invest in anything. Leaders who aim to enhance organizational performance through the use of digital technologies often have a specific tool in mind. “Our organization needs a machine learning strategy,” perhaps. But digital transformation should be guided by the broader business strategy.

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Chisomo Chiweza @chisomochiweza.com · 04/10/2026

Bible verse reading:

“My God, incline Your ear and hear! Open Your eyes and see our desolations and the city which is called by Your name; for we are not presenting our pleas before You based on any merits of our own, but based on Your great compassion. ”
Daniel 9:18 NASB2020

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Chisomo Chiweza @chisomochiweza.com · 27/09/2026

Was checking out LinkedIn. It's not perfect but it's nice that after months of being intentional about the content I engage with (and fighting with the algorithm lol), my feed is primarily engineering content as follows:

A linkedin post by Demitri Swan, a systems software engineer at Apple that says the following:

After completing the first 100 pages of this 1000+ page book on computer architecture, I can honestly say this is one of the most satisfying academic texts in computer science I’ve read since Introduction to Algorithms.

Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective fortifies what you already understand about computers with just enough detail such that the magic of computing is made quite practical and straightforward. After reading this text, everything about computing seems obvious and grounded in simple realities of the hardware and how compilers represent types and structure.

The book is dense with information and provides the mathematical proof for the claims made about computer systems. To add some levity, it intersperses historical anecdotes about systems that add color to your journey. Knowledge drops about the history of Unix, Linux, C, FreeBSD, GNU, POSIX, etc can be found throughout.

I highly recommend this book for software engineers who already have experience writing software and also enjoy either systems or knowing how it all works.

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Chisomo Chiweza @chisomochiweza.com · 17/09/2026

Very interesting.

Image with text reading the following:

The people who built databases didn't imagine Google. The people who built internet protocols didn't envision Stripe. They made lower-level capabilities so dependable that they could not only run in the background, but also be layered on top of. A Cambrian explosion of software emerged that nobody could have designed top-down.

Intelligence today is like databases before SQL: powerful, but every use is bespoke. Once a smart decision becomes as dependable and invokable as a database query, builders will stack them the same way. The intelligence revolution will be like the early internet: unplanned, distributed grassroots efforts built by builders for builders and owned by all.⁶

Safety is a precondition for layering. You let a component run unattended if it's reliable; you only build on top of it if it's trustworthy. It takes trust to bury a dependency five layers deep in a system. People will only do so if they can inspect it, test it, and constrain it piece by piece, the way we've always engineered dependable software. That's how the composable path enables an ecosystem of small, legible primitives to safely evolve into trustworthy, complex systems.

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Chisomo Chiweza @chisomochiweza.com · 27/08/2026

Absolutely.

Snippet from article musing over the future of software engineering.

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Chisomo Chiweza @chisomochiweza.com · 20/08/2026

If you want to use AI products to build better software for customers - that is good. But this concerted effort to de-skill really good programmers and mask that as 'inevitable for progress' is predictably - ridiculous. blog.florianherrengt.com/ai-removing-...

An image showing the following snippet from the main article:

I have worked with two junior developers recently who are very good precisely because they are trying to understand what they are doing rather than just producing code. They use AI to explore things they do not understand, ask questions to clarify their reasoning and double-check assumptions. They use the tools to increase their understanding.

I have also worked with senior developers who basically gave up and stopped trying to understand the code. They became much worse engineers as a result. At this point I would much rather work with those two juniors.

The problem is not AI. The problem is using AI as a substitute for understanding instead of a tool for building it.

Related to this, some people argued that we should not teach skills that AI can do better. The fact that a machine can do something better than humans does not automatically make learning it pointless.

We still teach arithmetic and algebra despite computers being vastly better at calculation. We teach spelling, grammar and essay writing. We even teach history and geography while everyone permanently has a device in their pocket that can look up almost any fact in seconds.

How else would you be developing the mental models required to understand, question and verify anything?

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