Software Madhouse

Programmers vs Developers vs Software Engineers

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Matt and Robert walk through four roles that get mixed together on job boards and resumes: programmer, software developer, software engineer, and computer scientist. They look at what each job actually covers, where “engineer” is a regulated title and where it is just a pay-band label, how ACM/IEEE CC2020 draws the line between computer science and software engineering, and how much of the “requirements” work now sits with product managers.

They also pull Bureau of Labor Statistics outlooks for programmers, software developers, and computer and information research scientists, and talk about what BLS is saying about AI and IT employment through 2034. The practical question underneath the titles: what do you actually own on a team, and what should you put on a resume when the words keep sliding.

What Is A Forward Deployed Engineer?

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Matt and Robert unpack the Forward Deployed Engineer: a Palantir-coined, customer-facing role that parks an engineer at a customer site for a set stretch of time. They trace the name to military “forward basing,” ask whether an FDE is just a consultant with better branding (or a one-person Pivotal-style embed), and look at why vendors bake these unicorns into the price of the software — so the product actually gets used instead of sitting on the shelf until next year’s renewal.

Links & mentions

FDE on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_deployed_engineer
A Day in the Life of a Palantir Forward Deployed Software Engineer: https://blog.palantir.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-palantir-forward-deployed-software-engineer-45ef2de257b1

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxIBrEyJO-k

Welcome to the Madhouse

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Matt and Robert launch Software Madhouse with the AI open-source firehose: drive-by slop PRs flooding projects like Helm, extra maintainer load, and how communities are fighting back with policies, GitHub caps, kernel Assisted-by: trailers, and tools like Vouch and Good Egg.

Links & mentions

Kubernetes: Open source maintainership in the age of AI — https://www.kubernetes.dev/blog/2026/06/26/open-source-maintainership-in-the-age-of-ai/
GitHub: Limit open PRs for users without write access — https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-17-limit-open-pull-requests-for-users-without-write-access/
Linux kernel coding assistants — https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html
Vouch (Mitchell Hashimoto / Ghostty) — https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch
Good Egg — https://github.com/2ndSetAI/good-egg

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRGkEQvsIGo