Austin Henley
@AustinZHenley
Associate Teaching Professor at Carnegie Mellon University⚡️AI and developer tools⚡️ex startup, ex Microsoft
Need a paper to read this weekend? I've got just the one for you.
One of the greatest books I’ve ever read. Many thanks to @AustinZHenley for recommending it to me! I only recently found out that that Don Norman @jnd1er holds a position here at @UCSanDiego !!!
this book taught me more about real design thinking than my 2 year industrial design masters program. it rewired how i saw doors, buttons, systems, everything. now i build digital interfaces, and it still shapes how i think. one of the most high signal books i’ve ever read.
After a long week, I love to sit down and write C code without any AI or autocomplete. It’s very meditating.
Usability is like security: if you don't design around it from the very start, when you try to patch it on, unless you get lucky, you'll discover all kinds of architectural commitments that make it really hard, and you'll always play catch-up.
Check out this hot HCI paper about autonomous agents! It’s from… wait a sec… 1997? “Researchers and software companies have set high hopes on so-called software agents, which "know" users' interests and can act autonomously on their behalf. Instead of exercising complete…
If you want unlimited Amp credits, all you need to do is join @Sourcegraph . Hit me up if interested!
Join Sourcegraph to get unlimited Amp credits 🤣
I never expected to blog, let alone be writing this much! 100 posts done. How many more to go? austinhenley.com/blog/100.html
What makes a good side project? austinhenley.com/blog/goodproje…
I found something better than ChatGPT or Cursor: post your code on Reddit and thousands of people will tell you why you’re wrong, provide code, analysis, and benchmarks. It’s like agents, but human!
Some Friday morning digging into the CPython codebase to figure out the fastest way to do string processing: austinhenley.com/blog/vowels.ht…
The large incumbents are struggling to innovate.
New blog post: AI at Amazon: a case study of britteleness surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/06/08/ai-…
“AI is hard, so instead we added transparency to everything and moved your favorite buttons.”
Compilers textbooks tend to present the various context-free parsing algorithms completely separately and it's hard to see where they come from. Why does shift-reduce parsing look so different from recursive-descent? You can understand all of them as simply refinements of...
underrated technique: vibe code a full-custom debug view for code you're writing by hand! in this case, visualizing a parsing algorithm 😎 a clear interactive visualization helps you really grok what's going on step by step, and of course helps with fixing bugs too