Yegge-Dex

A Directory of Steve Yegge's Blog/Article Posts
Page created: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2026-01-19

About this

Steve Yegge had an Amazon-internal blog called "Stevey’s Drunken Blog Rants" from 2004-2005. When he left Amazon, he cleaned them up and made them public. Steve is an extremely engaging writer and he’s got a lot of thought-provoking ideas. As an added bonus, when you read his posts chronologically, they work like a story: the developer’s search for the One True Programming Language and other geeky endeavors.

When Steve started work at Google, he moved his blog to Blogger. Unfortunately, Blogger has no satisfying way to read each entry in order (that I could find!). That’s why this page exists. I wrote a little Ruby script (see the bottom of this page) to grab the blog’s Atom feed and create a chronological index for my own reading enjoyment so I could continue the "story". Then I parsed the Google-hosted Amazon blog and added that to make a complete (?) index.

2026-Current (and I think I’ll get off whatever the hell this ride has turned into, thank you)

Yegge has lost his damn mind completely and my respect forever:

"I’ve merged over 100 PRs from nearly 50 contributors, adding 44k lines of code that no human has looked at. This has grown Gas Town’s total size to 189k lines of Go code since its first commit on Dec 15th…​"

That’s right, Steve freaking Yegge is now proud to be growing a codebase by unmaintainable LoC because, as we all know, more LoC is better. More of everything is better. And exponential more is exponentially better!!!

He should have stuck with that fun Java fantasy game and retired. Less money, but 1000x more purpose and humanity. I don’t actually think it’s the money anymore. I think it’s Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice wikipedia.org:

The poem begins as an old sorcerer departs his workshop, leaving his apprentice with chores to perform. Tired of fetching water by pail, the apprentice enchants a broom to do the work for him, using magic in which he is not fully trained…​

Thankfully,

When all seems lost, the old sorcerer returns and quickly breaks the spell.

Except Yegge is the old sorcerer. And today’s software apprentices are being told they must enchant brooms on day one.

This whole industry deserves to die.

2022-2025

I hate this. Steve joins Sourcegraph and leans heavily on playing to people’s fear about the "AI" future of programming. "This is inevitable, get on board or die. Oh, and by the way, this company I happen to work for is banking on it," kind of stuff. I’m not linking directly to any of these posts. You can go find them if you want.

  • 2025-03-22 "The new job of “software engineer,” by the end of this year, will involve little direct coding, and a lot of agent babysitting. The sooner you get on board with that, the easier your life will be."

  • 2024-06-24 "It doesn’t matter what approach you take, as long as you start making heavy use of chat in programming. Because that, friendo, is how it works now. Like it or not. And you need to survive it."

  • 2022-10-04 "I have joined Sourcegraph as Head of Engineering, where we are building the world’s most open and comprehensive code intelligence platform (CIP)."

I guess money really does crazy things to people. I’m sure there was a lot of it.

2020-2022

Steve left Grab…​to work full-time on his 2D online RPG game, Wyvern, which he’d been working on off-and-on since 2001. This marks my personal point of maximum respect for Steve!

2018-2020

These are from Steve’s account on Medium. Steve was employed by Grab until May 2020.

Update: In a wild case of synchronicity, I was creating this page today and saw that, lo and behold, Steve just moved from Blogger to Medium yesterday. So I’m starting a new section for the Medium articles as well.

2006-2017 (newest first)

These are from Stevey’s Blog Rants on Blogger. Steve was employed at Google during this time.

2004-2005

These are from Stevey’s Drunken Blog Rants. Steve was employed at Amazon during this period.

Creating an index of the Blogspot posts

Here’s my little Ruby script to parse the Blogspot ATOM feed and turn it into a simple HTML link list. (Which has since been turned into AsciiDoc, following the whims of your devoted webmaster.)

yeggeblog.rb
#nokogiri is a XML/HTML parsing wrapper can be installed via gem
# It uses libxml2 (was included with Slackware on my machine)
require 'nokogiri'
require 'date'

# yegge.xml downloaded via URL:
# http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=500
yegge = Nokogiri::XML(File.read("yegge.xml"))

# get each entry title, url and date
yegge.xpath('//xmlns:entry').each do |e|
	title = e.search('title')[0].text
	url = e.search('link[@rel=alternate]')[0]['href']
	date = e.search('published')[0].text
	date = Date.parse(date).to_s
	puts "<p><time>#{date}</time> <a class=\"entry\" href=\"#{url}\">#{title}</a></p>"
end