Wilson, Greg

Strong Engineers

Strong engineers can do things that weaker engineers just can’t, even with all the time in the world. Some examples of capabilities:

• Solving very difficult bugs, e.g., race conditions across multiple services.
• Delivering meaningful improvements to the thorniest parts of legacy codebases.
• Making changes that require a big architectural rework.

At the top end of strongest engineers, capabilities become something like “improving the SOTA for LLMs”.

Regular engineers make the bulk of most companies. They solve 95% of bugs (normal, non-cursed bugs), deliver most JIRA tickets, and unstick themselves from dev env issues most of the time. They help. They do the work. They’re just not burning with ambition to excel at the next promo cycle. Probably have other things going on in their lives.

Software Design by Example. A Tool-Based Introduction with Python. Greg Wilson. third-bit.com . Accessed Jan 20, 2026.

✅ Objects and Classes. What is a natural way to represent real-world “things” in code, and how can we organize that code so that it’s easier to understand, test, and extend?

Finding Duplicate Files. Comparing each file to others is unworkably slow for large sets of files. How about generating a short label that depends only on the file contents and comparing that instead?

implements a toy version of Python’s object system using dictionaries that contain references to properties, functions and other dictionaries. Consider two shapes, Square and Circle, with the methods perimeter, area, and density.

Objects

A function is an object, where the bytes in a function are instructions. For example:

def foo():
  print("in foo")

… creates an object in memory that contains instructions to print a string, and assigns that object to the variable foo.

Software Design by Example. A Tool-Based Introduction with JavaScript. Greg Wilson. third-bit.com . Accessed Jan 20, 2026.

Systems Programming. List a directory. Callback functions. Anonymous functions. Select a set of files. Copying a set of files.

Asynchronous Programming. Manage async executions. How promises work. Chain operations. How real promises are different. Build tools with promises. Readability. Handle errors with async code.