AI
Introducing Agent Skills in VS Code
Agent skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that load on demand. This is an open standard (i.e., it works in GitHub Cloud Agent, GitHub CLI, and other LLMs such as Claud Code). Skills help agents complete domain-specific tasks so you can compose complex workflows. To use in VS Code, go to Settings and enable “Use Agent Skills”. Put them in .github/skills/{topic}/SKILLS.md. The {topic} folder can contain other things like images, scripts, etc. Front matter (---) contains name: and description: (specifically when an agent should use this skill). When you chat with Copilot, it knows to look through these folders to see if there’s a skill to help it respond.
Change management
Why Keeping Up with Change Feels Harder Than Ever
Ungovernable change — changes stacked on top of each other, interdependent changes, externally driven changes, and changes that have no clear start or end date. The author proposes strategies for “routinizing” change: communicating that change is a journey (not a destination), enabling change-ready employees (not change enthusiasm), and foreseeing multiple possible scenarios (not just the current change).
Software engineering
We Need to Stop Calling Everything a Mock!
The term “mock” has been around since 2000 and has been mis-presented and misunderstood ever since. We need to use words that we all understand to mean the same thing. Test double is a more appropriate term for a stand-in object that can act in a variety of ways. Emily refers to the 2007 book xUnit Test Patterns by Gerard Meszaros. A stub returns specific hard-coded values or behaviors. A fake is a lightweight real implementation (e.g., in-memory database). A spy is a stub that records information about method calls it gets. A mock is like a spy but can fail a test on its own. The battle has been lost about correcting people; what’s important is how your test double is used in the test and how it works in making better object-oriented designs.
Clean Code is Right… It’s Just Not Enough
Software design is about understanding the problem, getting feedback on iterations of the software, and dividing the problem into small parts. Design is the real work. Language syntax and tools are simple, but we don’t spend much time on design. David states that Bob Martin’s Clean Code is the most durable model (naming, duplication, collaboration, SOLID, clarity, discipline); it’s core message is that code should be easy to read and understand because it’s read more than it’s written. People sometimes think of Clean Code as a style guide or recipe for aesthetics instead of good design principles. It also emphasizes abstraction for clarity rather than ease of experimentation. “Good engineering produces good code, not the other way around.” “Clean Code is craft; Modern Software Engineering is engineering. When they work together you get something very powerful.”