Ranjan Roy from Margins and Alex Stamos from Cognition are back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Is Sundar Pichai team product or team model? 2) Google's attempt to build a unified assistant 3) Which Google teams get priority? 4) Sundar's cloud allocation between Google Cloud and AI Research 5) Will Google Cloud Platform overtake Azure? 6) Meta Stock falls on worries about its fundraising and debt 7) OpenAI valuation takes a hit after investors feel "indigestion" given how much money they've poured into it 8) Is there any money left to fund AI? 9) Cognition CISO Alex Stamos joins to talk about the PHP bug is going to cause long term damage 10) How to protect yourself and your company from the ongoing cybersecurity risks 11) It's not just PHP, it's Black October for cybersecurity.

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We sit down with veteran Principal Engineer Justin Abrahms to discuss why having a clear engineering scoreboard is critical to winning the software delivery game. Drawing on his experience scaling deployment pipelines for payment engineers, platform engineering teams, and globocorps, Justin explains the simple truth: when you deliberately do the right things—embracing continuous delivery, small batch sizes, and tight feedback loops—you get the right outcomes. Yet despite these battle-tested practices existing for decades, our industry suffers from an "Eternal September" fueled by terrible onramps.

We dissect the performative theater of modern engineering, taking aim at the severe lack of intentionality in code reviews. Too many peer reviews devolve into superficial nitpicking rather than educational, inquisitive assessments of long-term maintainability. Justin shares lessons learned from working alongside Trevor Foucher (author of The Art of Readable Code) at Google, demonstrating how high-signal code reviews should actively educate developers and de-risk downstream systems before code ever hits production.

Finally, we confront the reality that raw development speed is profoundly addictive. Teams chase the immediate dopamine hit of generating code faster with LLMs, ignoring what happens when they look just one week or one month out and realize unmaintainable prototypes instantly collapse under the weight of real customer changes

• Book: The Psychology of Software Teams
• Short: Rory Sutherland — Slow is safer and better

• Warren - Malicious domain names research
• Justin - Deadworld Isekai

Learn how to write happy characters without boring your audience by discovering seven ways to show their happiness and make readers care.

We always say we don’t want to read about happy characters with perfect lives. We prefer to read about characters who are in trouble, people who are in crisis with challenges to overcome. Of course, we want the happy ending. We just don’t want to be bored on the journey to that ending.

Quote: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ ~ Leo Tolstoy

But there are characters in our stories who are happy – and good. Sometimes they are foils for our protagonists. Sometimes our protagonists live through intensely happy periods.

So, how do we write about happy characters without putting our audience to sleep? How do we get the characterisation right? We can’t just say that a character is happy. We have to show the happiness.

7 Secrets To Writing Happy Characters Without Boring Your Audience

What are the secrets to writing happy characters? I’ve looked at real people who are happy, and they seem to share these characteristics.

1. Happy People Focus On What They Have

This doesn’t mean they don’t want other things, but it does mean they are grateful for the small things.

Writing Tip: Some of the most beautiful moments in writing come when characters are doing ordinary things and are caught up in that moment.

Quote: ‘Happiness doesn’t lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.’ ~Dennis Lehane

2. Happy People Don’t Have Agendas

They have learnt to let go. Carrying around grudges and dreaming of revenge does not make anybody happy. People who are constantly plotting and manipulating are only happy if they are psychopaths, or writers, of course.

Writing Tip: Show your character making a choice that puts their own needs or relationships ahead of winning an argument or proving a point.

Quote: ‘If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man.’ ~Paulo Coelho

3. Happy People Don’t Need To Affirm Their Happiness Externally

People who constantly look to the outside world for approval will never be happy. So write about characters who are at peace with themselves. Happy characters have reached a point in their lives where they have made peace with the world.

Writing Tip: Peaceful moments with happy characters can provide a respite for a main character in distress.

Quote: ‘I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.’ ~Hunter S. Thompson

4. Happy People Are Generous

This doesn’t mean they are gregarious extroverts who give all their time to others. It means they give what they can, when they can.

Writing Tip: Show this by allowing these characters to give.

Quote: ‘Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.’ ~Charlotte Brontë

5. Happy People Aren’t In A Hurry

People who are merrily rushing around are generally only pretending to be happy. The noise and movement covers up the emptiness. Happy people often have hobbies, turn off their devices, and are happy to do nothing.

Writing Tip: Use these people to show your unhappy characters a different way of life. Use body language to underline this.

Quote: ‘And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”’ ~Kurt Vonnegut

6. Happy People Don’t Preach

Actions do speak louder than words. What do these people do every day that allows them to be content?

Writing Tip: Show their daily routines. Show their positive attitude and energy.

Quote: ‘Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.’ ~Anonymous

7. Happy People Take Responsibility

Happy people aren’t waiting for anybody to save them or give them something. They have taken responsibility for getting what they want or accepting what they have. They also know they are responsible for their past actions. They don’t waste time blaming others. If happy people want change, they generally act.

Quote: ‘Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.’ ~Alice Walker

In Summary

Perhaps the best way to think about happy characters is that they have already reached their destinations. They have looked at themselves and their lives and risked something to reach this state. They are what we are all striving for.

Setting up happy characters who are about to lose everything is also a skill. We have to show what they have so that the loss becomes personal for us.

Remember that happy characters are mostly likeable, good at what they do, and empathetic. They are good people. They probably love (or have loved) deeply and are (or were) loved in return. They have earned the right to be happy.

Quote: ‘We’re only passers-by, and all you can do is love what you have in your life. A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you’re born, sometimes grows if you aren’t in lucky surroundings. It’s our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us choking and gasping for breath in the mud.’ ~Jane Hamilton

The Last Word

We looked at seven ways to write happy characters without boring your audience. We explored how to show their happiness through their actions, attitudes, and everyday lives, using quotes from well-known writers to illustrate each point. Suggested extra reading: 29 Ways To Write About Happiness

Photo by Jacqueline Munguía on Unsplash

by Amanda Patterson
© Amanda Patterson

More posts from Amanda:

1. What Is A Phobia? How To Write Characters With Phobias
2. 3 Simple Ways To Make Your Hero Fight Back
3. 7 Reasons To Write The Ending Of Your Novel First
4. How To Make Readers Care About An Amoral Protagonist
5. Why Revenge Is A Brilliant Plot For First-Time Writers
6. The 5 Top Tips For Turning Memories Into A Memoir
7. How To Write A Prologue: 5 Good Reasons To Include One
8. How To Write A Locked-Room Mystery: The Secret To The Impossible Crime
9. 10 Ways To Get Out Of A Writing Rut
10. What Is A Denouement? How It Works In Fiction

The post 7 Secrets To Writing Happy Characters Without Boring Your Audience appeared first on Writers Write.

That’s a wrap on the week. I’m ready for a couple of days off!

[blog] Tokens to Deploy: Agent Skills are Great but CLI’s are Better. Such a great post. Which deployment approach eats the fewest tokens? Esther looked at the viable options and brought receipts.

[article] When are developers receptive to proactive AI suggestions? It’s pretty clear that developers only want eager AI suggestions at natural boundaries of their work. Not randomly in the middle.

[article] Eight reasons coding agents are better than software developers. The writer will have the counter piece (“why developers are better than agents”) next week, so don’t freak out. But if we’re being honest with ourselves, these points are valid.

[blog] Getting Started with the Google Cloud CLI Remote MCP Server. We just saw above that CLIs are an efficient and effective tool for agents. But maybe your agent can’t call local CLIs or tools. That’s where a CLI-over-MCP comes in.

[blog] Rewrite Everything in Java: Not Rust. Well that’s a bit of cold water on “Rust all the things.” Use whatever language you want, but some are wildly overhyped right now.

[blog] AI makes it easy to migrate. Flutter makes it easy to scale. Read this. It’s a good argument for why you should be thoughtful about duplicating codebases for different platforms.

[blog] Software is slow because of bad design, not slow languages. Tell me he’s wrong. Your speed problem is not about your choice of language. It’s design.

[youtube-video] AI harness crash course. People are using the word “harness” to represent many things. Annie does a good job here explaining what a harness is about.

[blog] When to use a diffusion LLM: I compared DiffusionGemma and Gemma 4. Diffusion LLMs are cool and instances like DiffusionGemma generates entire token blocks at once. Super fast. But Karl shows that “regular” Gemma 4 is still the best choice for step by step reasoning.

[article] PHP2Shell was only the beginning: AI is accelerating the patch race. Worst week ever in cybersecurity? Possibly. It’s not going to get better any time soon.

[blog] Streaming comes to API Gateway: real-time and AI-ready APIs, without changing your spec. Here’s a great option if you have streaming results from LLMs, agents, or APIs and want a proxy in front.

[blog] Introducing the Elephant-Goldfish Model plugin: scaling design-driven AI software development. Have you heard of this? It’s a way of thinking about AI coding, and we’ve now open sourced an agent plugin that you can use too.

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