The laws of thermodynamics.

Drive #EV, scan QR codes at night under the rain, so you can install the app to charge the car, but first enter a payment method. Step back in the car, as you cannot hold a phone, your credit card and the umbrella. The app will silently fail to validate the credit card numbers, and loop back to ask to add another payment method. And your date of birth, social security number, and your GPS location. The blue light starts to glow under the rain, is it finally charging? How much will they charge?

I've been busy publishing on my website some of my recent pattern-related writing.
Inspired by code smells, Chris Kohls and I conceived of "pattern smells" and co-authored Pattern Smells, Get Rid of Them. This was workshopped at VikingPLoP 2026 in April... See https://wirfs-brock.com/rebecca/papers/patternsmells/

Pattern smells name and classify recurring weaknesses in patterns, ranging from misconceptions, insufficient domain grounding, and gaps in analysis, to overly optimistic or incomplete utopic claims and lack of wholeness.

Taking this one step further, we wrote the paper, Constructive Feedback Using Pattern Smells which we workshopped at EuroPLoP 2026: https://wirfs-brock.com/rebecca/papers/constructivefeedback/

So far, we have identified over 30 smells and characterized how and when they appear in the lifecycle of identifying, writing, and publishing patterns. https://wirfs-brock.com/rebecca/papers/patternsmells/media/diagram_full.png

If you would like to comment on the notion of "pattern smells", add your own favorite "smell" to our growing list, or just share a story or two about your pattern experiences, I would welcome hearing from you.

Do UK government services need a frontend framework? 🤔

I built the same service using 8 backends: Node.js, Go, Java, .NET, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Rust.

All produce GOV.UK Frontend HTML checked against official fixtures. No React, Vue, Angular, or Svelte required.

Popularity ≠ suitability. User needs should drive technology choices, not trends.

8 backends. 1 GOV.UK Frontend. 0 frontend frameworks.

https://nooshu.com/blog/2026/10/15/building-services-to-gds-standards-without-a-frontend-framework/

Submit your #ICSA2027 research track paper abstract by October 30th.

https://conf.researchr.org/track/icsa-2027/icsa-2027-papers

Submit your working session proposal at #ICSA2027 by October 15th.

https://conf.researchr.org/track/icsa-2027/icsa-2027-working-sessions

AI-powered lawyer bots answering calls from authors seeking statutory damages whose work was willfully pirated to train #AI models

Job opportunity alert! At TU Delft, we have a vacancy for an assistant professor in software engineering!

AI is disrupting all aspects of software engineering -- we are looking for enthusiastic colleagues who shape this revolution in research, education, and society.

- Apply at https://careers.tudelft.nl/job/Delft-Assistant-Professor-in-Computer-Science-2628-CD/1371842257/
- Deadline: November 1st!
- If you have questions: reach out to me!

Refueling an EV be like: https://blog.tomayac.com/2026/10/08/refueling-an-ev-be-like/. New blog post in which I describe a worst case (but not too far from the average) public charging experience for people who never drove an electric vehicle. 🚗🪫 Despite the current horrors, I'd never go back to another car than an electric vehicle. 🔋☀️
#EV #EVdriving #Solar

"The people holding up the internet"

A good-looking but somewhat depressing exposé about the people holding up current digital infrastructure as a hobby.

https://sheets.works/data-viz/holding-up-the-internet

Decisions must be supported by evidence, so #AI agents take screenshots of any source they consulted to extract the information from.

#BPM2026

#AI Agents pre-execute tasks, so that humans don't have to and can just check the results.

#BPM2026 industry track

Let's use an agentic swarm instead of one #AI agent. Tokens are for free.

#BPM2026

Fine-Grained Control of
Blockchain-Based Business Process
Instance Deployment

Hassan Atwi and Cesare Pautasso

#BPM2026 process technology forum

You don’t have to say that, #AI just knows.

#BPM2026

humans redress AI-powered decisions,

humans appeal to #AI agents to correct wrong human decisions.

#BPM2026 future workshop

Presentation karaoke over #AI generated slides

https://intertwingly.net/blog/2026/09/25/Pencils-Down-Notation-Up.html

Architectural elements in 2026:

Software
Data
AI

where #AI is Software doing a few matrix multiplications over several GBs of Data

"We have waited thirty years for the cyberlibertarian future to arrive and produce the promised harmonious community. It's time to face the facts. It's never coming."

Mat Duggan looks back at how the assumptions and contradictions in popular 1990s Internet manifestos set us up for the Internet's current manifest failures. Mat's essay includes link to a 1997 essay by Langdon Winner pointing that out early on: https://matduggan.com/the-intolerable-hypocrisy-of-cyberlibertarianism/